On Wed, Dec 3, 2008 at 10:59 AM, Daniel Schwen lists@schwen.de wrote:
So how does this take care of deep indexing non-atomic categories? =>How will this extension be even remotely useful for let's say commons?
That's a social problem, and so of secondary importance. Once a technical mechanism exists for solving the problem given a particular type of categories, recategorization will happen, sooner or later. If you think people will flat-out refuse to move to a new, better system, I think you're mistaken: look at the completeness of the move from lists to categories, for instance, when categories were first introduced. (Lists are still used, but in most cases only where they do things that categories currently cannot.) The same goes for all the other useful technical innovations that get introduced. All it would take is running some bots for a while to switch to the better system, not a big cost for a large wiki like Commons with plenty of bot operators.
On a technical level, dealing with non-atomic categories is a much bigger pain than dealing with atomic ones. On a social level, on the other hand, they're equally doable, as dewiki shows. There will be transition costs for wikis that have a large body of non-atomic categories, but those will be one-time only.