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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