Re: [Wikitech-l] The never-dying topic: category intersection (been there done that .. to the power of three)

On Wed, Dec 3, 2008 at 11:43 AM, Daniel Schwen <lists(a)schwen.de> wrote: Of course, humans would have to manually specify which new categories each old one corresponds to, but that's a perfectly doable job for a small group of volunteers working over the course of months. The bots would do the much more tedious work of actually replacing them, so each category could take substantially less than a minute of human review. The category intersection feature would then get incrementally more useful as the work progressed. There's a world of difference between showing that something is feasible in theory, and making it a core part of the software that's visible on every category page on every Wikimedia wiki without asking for community consensus in advance. As soon as people actually start using the feature, and they will if there's a box on every category page, they'll realize that it would be way more useful if they changed how things are categorized. As long as category intersections remain vaporware, there's no incentive to change. A technical fait accompli will bring about change. Even if Commons hypothetically didn't go along with the scheme, it would be valuable to have it in the software anyway. Plenty of wikis could still use it, like dewiki. We need an interface and we need a backend and we need someone to hook them together and commit them to Subversion. People have spent too much time inventing and reinventing and re-reinventing new and different but basically interchangeable backends, and too little time on the other parts of the problem. If the feature were committed to the software with a completely brainless backend unusable on Wikimedia wikis, I predict it would be live on all sites in less than six months.