[Wikipedia-l] Re: Categories in the PHP script

[Robert Bihlmeyer]

Simon Kissane <sj_kissane at yahoo.com> writes:

> I both agree and disagree. An organized collection of
> links can be useful. But an alphabetical list of
> articles in the category can still be quite useful. 

[later:]

> I don't envision the primary responsibility for
> categorisation necessarily being with the writer of
> the page.

[and, on the topic of "just edit one page":]

> Well, it depends on how well you know the category,
> and how it is organized. If you are thinking of just
> assigning things to major categories, like "Physics",
> or "Philosophy" and "History", and we are in the
> process of assigning 20,000 articles to these major
> categories, then just being able to click "Edit this
> page", add "{{CATEGORY}}}" and save is a lot simpler.

I think my suggestion to add a "put this page in the following
categories" box (in addition to the normal "edit page text" box) can
achieve all that:

* Page authors not interested in elaborate categorisation have a quick
way to stuff a topic into the right categories.

* These categories end up with an unsorted (or alphabetically sorted)
  list of topics.

* "Categorisers" can use this unsorted lists and gradually move topics
  from there into a proper order.

* Topics which are afterwards put in a category the same way again end
  up in an unsorted section, ready to be moved into the existing
  order.

> I know it might sound like a bit of an overkill, but
> we could have both -- we could have organized and
> unorganized category pages, the unorganized ones
> automatically generated, the organized ones made by
> hand. Since we'd only have to maintain one (the
> organized one), its really no more work than we have
> at the moment.

My scheme keeps both parts (manual and automatic) of a category on one
page so that they can be kept in sync more easily. Otherwise
"categorisers" always have to scan the automatic page for changes.

> Well, my suggestion was that they would be
> subcategories, or independent categories in their own
> life... so an algorithm could go in the category
> [[Computer Science/Algorithms]], or alternatively in
> both the [[Computer Science]] category and the
> [[Algorithms]] category. Using a modification of
> Magnus' proposal you could display the contents of
> multiple categories on the one page.

This would work, although it would blur the one-article-one-page
concept. What would you be editing if you select "edit" on such an
[[Computer Science]] page automatically built from a number of
subpages?

-- 
Robbe
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