Magnus- Nice! Since you coded it, you may call it a "Magnus style scheme" ;-) Some feedback: 1) If there's just one article, it still gets a semicolon appended. I have no opinion yet as to whether the list should be formatted as one big block or as a list, though. 2) We don't seem to have parent/child categories yet. If a category is itself added to a category, the parent category should have a section called == Child categories == And the child category should have a section called == Parent categories == By having this kind of automatic directory-like organization, we could avoid a lot of category redundancy by only adding the most relevant, lowest level category to each article. 3) Similarly, it would be neat if the list of categories would be structured according to parent child relationships, i.e. * Biology ** Medicine * France ** French monarch ... 4) I think the categories should be put under the page subtitle, or at the bottom of the page, but definitely not next to "printable version". 5) After I initially proposed the scheme, Brion suggested that it would be useful to have some way to specify how an article should be sorted in the category list, e.g. [[Category:Author|King, Stephen]] I'm worried about this if we don't have hierarchical categories. Otherwise, I think we can avoid creating a too big mess by coming up with a reasonable hierarchy. Regards, Erik

Anthere wrote: No worry, it's just an attempt to get the language links into their own database table; just another experiment, it has nothing to do with the category scheme. Magnus

Magnus- Bug report first: The new "Subcategories" links do not point to the Category: namespace but into the main namespace. Of course! D'oh. Yes, I think it should appear under both. A little redundancy here won't hurt. I agree, looks fine to me. I presume you're using the LINKS table. Why not add a LINK_ID to the table and have a separate LINK_AS table that includes the sorting criteria and can be looked up for categories? Updated on page save? As for separation, let's keep the idea of a meta namespace open -- we can always move this stuff if need be. I envision a scheme where by default, a user sees two edit windows for each page, the big article editor and a small meta editor, but he can decide to disable the meta stuff if he doesn't care about it at all. Regards, Erik

Magnus Manske wrote: Cool! Comments: When you list subcategories on a category page, you link to [[XXX]] when you should link to [[Category:XXX]]. On [[test:]] at least, this means a lot of spurious red links! If I add a category link to an article and return to the category page, then my browser isn't told that the category page has been changed. This means that I should never trust a category page without reloading. A simple solution might be to never cache category pages, yet this will be problematic when the category pages become long. The more complete solution is to tell the cache to expire whenever the table of categories is changed for that category, rather than only when the category page itself has been edited; but I don't know how well that would fit into your code. If a category page doesn't exist but I go to it anyway, then all I see is "(There is currently no text in this page)". There's no indication that there are already articels in the category. Could we still list them after "(There is currently no text ...)"? The following two concerns may have a combined solution: There is no support for redirected categories. For example, [[Category:Abstract Algebra]] redirects to the correct [[Category:Abstract algebra]] (and we want to allow this, or people will duplicate things!). Yet [[Category:Abstract algebra]] doesn't list the items that link to [[Category:Abstract Algebra]]. Instead, it only lists [[Category:Abstract Algebra]] as a subcategory, which is not what it really is. Category redirects were an important feature of Erik's idea. You also don't list subcategories of subcategories. We don't really need this, since you can look at the subcategories, but it could confuse people as to what categories already exist. Now, we could ask people to link to [[Category:Mathematics]] whenever they link a category page to [[Category:Group theory]] (of course, you would not require this in ordinary articles). OTOH, you could list subcategories of subcategories fairly cleanly by using nested list structures in the rendered HTML; without that, it would end up being pretty messy. The combined solution: Use a nested list structure similar to that on [[Special:Whatlinkshere]]. Then [[Category:Mathematics]] (as things now stand on [[test:]]) would say: "== Subcategories == "* [[Category:Advanced mathematics]] "** [[Category:Abstract algebra]] "*** [[Category:Abstract Algebra]] (redirect) "**** [[Category:Group theory]] "** [[Category:Set theory]] "* [[Category:Logic]] "* [[Category:Philosophy of mathematics]] "** [[Category:Foundations of mathematics]] It would be nicer, of course, to elide the redirect entirely, but perhaps that would be more difficult to programme? Potentially, you could stick a list of all articles in each subcategory inside this nested list structure, but that would probably be too long. (BTW, I've decided that [[Category:Advanced mathematics]] is a bad idea, but that's irrelevant to this discussion.) The following comments are not very important, so don't hold off on implementation because of them: Links to categories probably shouldn't show up as stubs (brown text). But they should still show up as nonexistent (red text) when applicable. If I put category links or interlanguage links at the bottom of a page, then this puts additional whitespace at the bottom of the HTML that really shouldn't be there; and this is not a new problem. It makes [[Category:Logic]] (for example) look kind of funny. Shouldn't category pages have yellow backgrounds? I'm conflicted. The list of articles in a category would look nicer if titles were given using spaces instead of underscores. The same goes for the list of subcategories of a category and the list of all categories on [[Special:Categories]]. Perhaps this should be announced on <wikipedia-L>? After all, we've been discussing category schemes over there. Then give them maybe a week? -- Toby

Magnus- some further thoughts&comments on the current implementation: 1) I think the "Categories:" link at the top should only show up on pages that actually have categories assigned to them. Otherwise it's slightly confusing to click the link and end up with a list of categories which have no relationship to the current article (and it also shows up somewhat annoyingly on special pages). If you want a generally available "List of categories", that seems to be a job for a special page. 2) I'm not sure the "|" is a good category separator. When I see Categories: Biology | Medicine | Health This suggests to me a kind of hierarchy, whereas Categories: Biology, Medicine, Health seems to indicate better that it is a list of items that do not necessarily have a relationship to each other. 3) The categories are not currently displayed in the Cologne Blue skin. Since you seem to like it, I thought I'd point that out ;-) Once we have this set up, we'll have to think long and hard about related policies. What to put on category pages? Should parent categories be linked when child categories are already linked? Should we replace the current Main Page navigation with a category-based one? Should currently hand-maintained pages like "Needing attention", "Votes for deletion", "Fix a stub" be automated using categories? (Maybe we need MetaCategories?) etc. etc. Boy, this is gonna be fun ;-) Yes, that might be worth doing. I suggest waiting with the implementation until it becomes a real problem, though. Of course if it's all optional, I have no complaints about having it implemented right away. :-) Regards, Erik

Magnus Manske wrote: I'm just glad that something is happening. I do have some concerns similar to those expressed by Magnus. I'll be away for the next month, and I'll be looking forward to see what goes wrong in my absence. :-) I do believe that most of the real problems won't show up until the scheme has had a chance to be tried by Wikipedians in general instead of on test Wiki. Eclecticology

On Sun, 29 Jun 2003, Timwi wrote: Personally, I like the |'s better. I would propose the [[:Category:something]] syntax here, because an equivalent piece of syntax already exists for images and such ([[:Image:something]] gives a normal link to an image page). One thing I would like to remark, is that for interwiki use, if at all possible the word "Category" should be softcoded, so that it can be overruled in a language's language.php. Andre Engels

Andre Engels wrote in part: Yes, [[Category:]] should be a namespace. Right now it technically isn't. -- Toby