[WikiEN-l] If anyone ever says Wikipedia is too deletionist

[Carcharoth]

On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 3:24 PM, Magnus
Manske<magnusmanske at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 11:53 AM, David Gerard<dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 2009/8/9 Bod Notbod <bodnotbod at gmail.com>:
>>> On Sun, Aug 9, 2009 at 12:47 PM, David Gerard<dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>>> The problem being discussed in this thread would be solved by the
>>>> feature (much-desired by Commons) of turning categories into tags - so
>>>> that e.g. [[Category:Left-handed dead Jewish lesbian presidents of the
>>>> United States]] could become a query combining a pile of tags, rather
>>>> than a ridiculously specific sub-sub-category as we have now.
>>
>>> So would tags replace categories or work alongside?
>>
>>
>> Ideally, they'd work much as cats do now, but you could easily run
>> Boolean queries on them without MediaWiki falling over.
>
> http://toolserver.org/~magnus/catscan_rewrite.php?categories=1912+births%0D%0AWorld+War+I+historians

Looks good.

Trouble is that the category system in place at the moment duplicates
things a lot.

To get the English WW1 historians, I had to intersect:

*English historians
*World War I historians

To get:

A. J. P. Taylor
John Keegan
Martin Gilbert

But if I want European historians, that's not possible unless you know
the country categories you want and unify them. And I can think of
other searches that are not possible because of the way the categories
are set up at the moment.

But that beta V 2.0 of catscan does look really good! :-)

Is there a summary of what's changed?

One thing: when selecting depth, sometimes you want one category to be
0 depth, but the other category to be a different depth. Is that not
possible?

Carcharoth