[Wikipedia-l] Categories in the PHP script

[Simon Kissane]

I like Magnus' idea a lot. Yes, we could just use
ordinary old links. But I like this better for a
couple of reasons:
1. Software can understand the {{CATEGORY ...}}
notation much better than it can understand plain old
links. What if I want to extract all the articles on
linguistics from Wikipedia? With categories like this,
I could have a script that could do it easily. But
with just plain old links, writing a script to do it
would be difficult.
2. We can easily find "loose" pages, that don't belong
to a category. (On the other hand, we could mark the
category pages as category pages, and then search for
pages aren't linked from a page marked as a category
page.)

Larry suggested having a drop-down box, to limit the
categories the users could choose from. I think
Wikipedia should support multiple category schemes,
and should allow anyone to add their own categories.
That way we can experiment, and see what works best.
People with alternative views of how to categorise
things can create their own category schemes (and
categorising things is one area where there are often
as many views as there are people, probably because
there is no one right answer.)

I think it would be nice if we could have different
"category namespaces", to support multiple category
schemes. There should also be a way to lock cateogy
namespaces: so I can have my own category namespace,
and only I am allowed to assign pages to categories
within it; or so (like Larry seems to be suggesting)
people can't create their own categories, but they can
assign pages to pre-existing ones.

I also think that information on "what pages this
category belongs to" belongs in the category, not in
the page (although I don't know how you were actually
installing this.)

Finally, even if we don't want this sort of feature
for Wikipedia, why not keep the code, but make it an
administrator configurable option? So if Larry & Jimbo
don't want to use it on the Wikipedia.com server, they
can switch it off, but if other people want to take
PHP Wikipedia's code to use for some other purpose
they can turn it on if they want to?

Simon Kissane

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