On 8/14/07, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
Your suggestion is simmlar to what I've been advocating for a while. Perhaps your particular version will gain the traction mine have failed to gain.
Sorry to re-invent parts of your wheel :-)
Perhaps instead of 'implications' being hard hard assignment they were used in a way users can reject 'implications' which don't apply. This could be accomplished through a kind of negative entry like [[-Category:foo]]. Obviously the correct this to do would be to only use implications in the right places, but there are always exceptions... it would be a shame to introduce something which couldn't handle them.
Hmmm... [[Category:-foo]] sounds better, and wouldn't involve special syntax, only magic for categories starting with "-", which shouldn't affect any existing categories.
It seems your suggestion includes the concept of creating a new kind of thing, while I've previously proposed that we just repurpose categories for this application.
I don't much care if the solution uses categories, or some new syntax and foolinks table. ... it's just that categories are readily available for this purpose. Really it's all the same to me.
The only compelling reason I can see to use something other than categories for this is that we don't currently have real category redirects, which would be useful to allow a single unique tag to have representations in multiple languages. If providing yet another syntax is what it takes to get adoption then I'm all for it.
I was thinking along the lines of a system /not/ based on the wiki text, as categories are. Something that can be handled without editing the page. For example, I wrote a JavaScript that allows for adding/editing categories visually separate from text editing (well, almost). However, this breaks as soon as a category is transcluded through a template. There lies a source of potential coding nightmares ;-)
I have an existing local tool which recommends categories based on the parent categories on the image as well as the categories which are on images which are also in the existing categories or on gallery pages common to the image it is suggesting for. It would be pretty easy to convert that into a webapp, possibly even an ajax popup that inserts the new selections directly into the site.
Adding new categories to a page is easy enough, altering/removing them programmatically is when your hair starts to fall out ;-)
Magnus