The following was sent to me by Nikola Smolenski (thank you very much!). I'm forwarding it to this list hopeing that someone can suggest the proper way to get this into the CVS.

thanks, daniel.

-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Advancing the concept of categories Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2004 11:08:50 +0200 From: Nikola Smolenski smolensk@eunet.yu To: Daniel Kinzler daniel@brightbyte.de References: 20040824053338.75B8519503A4@mail.wikimedia.org 412B7282.30307@brightbyte.de

Hi David!

On Tuesday 24 August 2004 18:53, Daniel Kinzler wrote:

In the german WP, we have massive problems devising a consistent and useful pattern for categorisation. After some trying and discussiong, it seems that the software laks some features that would make categories a truly powerful tool of structuring the WP. So my question is how hard it would be to implement those features. Here are the once I personally (and quite a few others, too) feel are the most important:

• Search over cross-sections of categories, an a sensible syntax for

linking to such sections.

I have made a patch which does this, and Timwi did some improvement on it, but it is not commited for reasons unknown to me. See "Multiple categories" thread at http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2004-July/thread.html

The patch makes cross-sections by separating categories with / , for example Category:City/Germany gives a list of all cities in Germany. Someone reported that there are several (about 10 on all Wikipedias) categories which have / in the name so perhaps there should be a vote on Meta about this (should these categories be renamed or should some other separator be used and which one; Timwi suggested // ).

I really don't know how to convince someone with CVS access to commit this patch. Perhaps a feature request should be made at wikizilla and voted for.

• a concept of implicite membership in categories, such that members of

a sub-categorie are automatically members of the parent-categorie(s) (transitive covers). For category-display, this should be optional. For cross sections, this should be the default behaviour.

• A disctinction between a categorie being a subcategory, or just

belonging to another categorie, just as Articles do.

would it be feasable to put this features into the software? What would be the problems? how soom could we have such features?

It could probably be done, and I could do it, but I surely won't before the first one is implemented.