On 7/26/06, Stephen Forrest <stephen.forrest(a)gmail.com> wrote:
But if the mere act of category inclusion caused a
category to "exist"
in this way, then there would never be any redlinked categories at
all, except during preview, no?
Well I was thinking of a middle ground, whereby if two pages linked to
the same "non-existent" category, it became "existent" - well, blue
at
least. It would be nice to encourage people to think about ways of
dividing up big categories. I've come across some monsters on EN
lately, such as [[Category:Poetic form]] and [[Category:XML-based
standards]].
A lot could be done to make category reorganisation easier. I don't
have many concrete ideas yet, but displaying local hiercharies is
another thing that would be cool...
Redlinking of categories does serve some useful
purpose. Though an
uncreated category may contain articles, it will by definition never
have a place in the category hierarchy and never have interwiki links
to equivalent categories in other wikis. These last two things are
Yes, but there are many problems like (eg, pages that aren't linked
to, pages that don't link to anything, pages that aren't categorised)
that best dealt with through "special pages". "Category has no
super-category" does not seem an appropriate reason for the category
to be a redlink - especially since it's easy to have a category with
no super category that *isn't* a redlink.
also very important for small wikipedias. Though
"blue-linking"
doesn't guarantee either will be the case, it's useful to have
redlinking to spot when they're definitely not there.
I actually meant wiki in the general sense when I said "small wikis".
Not very clear I admit :)
That said, you have a point. It is a bit odd that the
first thing one
does to "create" a category is submit a blank edit field.
Yep. When users have to do strange, non-intuitive things to reach
normal situations, you know something is probably not quite right.
Steve