I'm writing to ask a developer to take a look at a proposal being developed at English Wikipedia at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Category_intersection
There are some long festering basic conflicts in how people use categories that we think could be solved if a category intersection feature were implemented. We are aware that this has been discussed quite a bit in the past, and that code to do category intersections has even been written (DynamicPageList2).
Rick Block and I have been working on a design and policy proposal for a MediaWiki category intersection feature that would allow categories to be defined as the intersection of other categories and would also provide a simple interface for creating "on the fly" intersections. We think this would solve may categorization headaches, while also providing a generally useful new feature. Rick and I are both admins, and software designers who have been very involved in categorization policy for a couple of years. We've shown the proposal to select members of the community who have been very involved with categorization and have gotten a favorable response.
Before we go any further with this proposal we'd like feedback from developers. Do you think what we are proposing is feasible? If so, do you have any suggestions for improving it? If not, what makes it unfeasible, and do you have any ideas about how to make it feasible? Please reply on the talk page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Category_intersection
Thanks very much for your time.
-- Sam