On 7/26/06, Stephen Forrest stephen.forrest@gmail.com wrote:
But if the mere act of category inclusion caused a category to "exist" in this way, then there would never be any redlinked categories at all, except during preview, no?
Well I was thinking of a middle ground, whereby if two pages linked to the same "non-existent" category, it became "existent" - well, blue at least. It would be nice to encourage people to think about ways of dividing up big categories. I've come across some monsters on EN lately, such as [[Category:Poetic form]] and [[Category:XML-based standards]].
A lot could be done to make category reorganisation easier. I don't have many concrete ideas yet, but displaying local hiercharies is another thing that would be cool...
Redlinking of categories does serve some useful purpose. Though an uncreated category may contain articles, it will by definition never have a place in the category hierarchy and never have interwiki links to equivalent categories in other wikis. These last two things are
Yes, but there are many problems like (eg, pages that aren't linked to, pages that don't link to anything, pages that aren't categorised) that best dealt with through "special pages". "Category has no super-category" does not seem an appropriate reason for the category to be a redlink - especially since it's easy to have a category with no super category that *isn't* a redlink.
also very important for small wikipedias. Though "blue-linking" doesn't guarantee either will be the case, it's useful to have redlinking to spot when they're definitely not there.
I actually meant wiki in the general sense when I said "small wikis". Not very clear I admit :)
That said, you have a point. It is a bit odd that the first thing one does to "create" a category is submit a blank edit field.
Yep. When users have to do strange, non-intuitive things to reach normal situations, you know something is probably not quite right.
Steve