"Aryeh Gregor" Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com wrote:
I'd like for you to be right. But switching from the present category system to atomic categories is not as straight forward as having a few bots run over all existing cats.
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. [...]
Add to that the maintenance costs because you would want to ensure that if someone who is not aware of the concept of atomic categories adds a [[Category:Manhattan]] to something he adds [[Category:New York]], [[Category:East Coast of the United States]], [[Category:United States]] and the other gigazillion umbrella categories as well so searches for a building in a country bordering a water body will still show results.
Tim