Magnus Manske wrote:
Toby Bartels wrote:
Your idea of letting the software interpret [[List of ...]] as in [[List of biology topics]] is interesting, although Magnus' category code is much further along. Also, [[List of actors]] is a rather different page; it's encyclopedic, whereas [[List of biology topics]], by listing pages in Wikipedia, is /about/ Wikipedia. (By rights, it should be [[Wikipedia:List of biology topics]].) So the [[Category:]] plan can replace [[List of biology topics]] but should leave [[List of actors]] as it is.
Which in no way hinders us to take one (existing) list or the other (e.g., [[List of biology topics]]), and run a bot (once) adding "[[Category:Biology]]" on all pages listed there. The [[List of biology topics]] will then be obsolete and can be redirected to [[Category:Biology]].
Yes, this is the straightforward way to apply your code, and it's consistent with Cunc's plea that we start with a small change to the way that people currently use Wikipedia. Your code does this.
My point is that [[List of actors]] isn't quite the same thing. (Although it's iffy -- a better example might be [[List of monarchs of Great Britain]], which any encyclopedia should have among its articles, rather than among its backroom [[Category:]] namespace.) So no bot should be run on [[List of monarchs of Great Britain]] -- or in any case, only a modified bot that won't create the redirect.
Thus, I must decide that ''merely'' changing the software's interpretation of [[List of ...]] pages is insufficient; we should introduce [[Category:]]. Thus your code (or maybe [[Category=]] to avoid overloading the colon) is the way to go, IMO.
We can complicate it more later if we need to. ^_^
-- Toby