Gabriel Wicke wrote:
It's currently not possible to link to a category without making that page a member of it (See http://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_issues#How_to_link_to_category_witho...).
This is a bit of a problem of course, Brion proposes a separate link table for category-member links as a solution. This would also allow to add a field that records the date when a page was added to the category which would be very useful for sorting category overview pages by date.
A long time ago (Phase II, IIRC), someone also suggested alternate listing abilities, especially for people. So, on [[George Bush]], [[Category:People|Bush, George]] would later be sorted and listed as "Bush, George", rather than under the real page title. Which makes sense, but is also impossible to do with the current setup.
Then there's also the "image category" issue, where we'd get some kind of automated photo album. Investment for wikimedia commons, at least.
This would be hard to change later, so i'd like to start some discussion on this now before the category feature goes live.
Not really; a single SQL query should be enough to fill a new category table with values from the link table. The addition dates would be dummies, of course, but I could live with that. Downtime, if any, should be within minutes. Or we do it when we switch to the new DB server...
Not to push my code or anything, but IMO we should go live with the current code (unless there'd something broken with it), and switch over later. I feel the time is right to introduce categories now. The experience will will gain with using the current category system will be very helpful in implementing a next stage, by avoiding flaws and adding functions we simply cannot forsee by running it on a test page.
Magnus