[Commons-l] "Did you know?" ... The family tree of [[Category:Copyright statuses]] and our broken category system.

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 1/29/07, Stan Shebs <stanshebs at earthlink.net> wrote:
> Hee hee, I'm thinking I should take a couple weeks of wikicommonsbreak
> right about now! But seriously, what you're talking about will stir up a
> large percentage of the commons people who obsess over categories. I'm
> not even sure having category intersections in the software will satisfy
> some of these folks - they go on about server loads and the like as
> well. I'd suggest just bringing up the issue and watching the fur fly,
> before deciding to invest time in rewriting anything...

:) But the fun is just beginning! :)

As far as load goes, it's only a question of implementation.
A few months back I posted some example performance data for
intersections using inverted indexing using the actual enwiki category
data: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/htdig/wikitech-l/2006-September/026715.html

Even the most evil cases (intersecting two huge categories) ran very
quickly. (For example the intersection of GFDL images and
living_persons each which has over 100,000 members took 25ms).

The technical obstacle of getting the software implemented is far
smaller than the data quality issues we have.