[Wikipedia-l] Categories: An implementation

[Neil Harris]

Magnus Manske wrote:

>Filters only work if articles are assigned to categories. Setting aside wether we should use categories in wikipedia itself or only in some sifter project, categories have to be implemented in the software either way. So I hacked a barebone implementation at the test site. A list of current categories can be found at
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>http://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special%3ACategories
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>Thoughts? Comments? Bullets? ;-)
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>Magnus
>
At the moment, a sort of "category" function is being performed by the 
lists on the en wiki called "List of XXX topics", for various values of 
XXX.  These are just "dumb" pages, with no special software support, 
maintained by hand.

Your category suggestion, so far,  just  automates these lists. I agree 
that a proper category/scoring framework would be great, but it needs to 
be more general than this. Category membership is a special case of 
scoring, a much more powerful concept. For example, I'd like to be able 
to cast a vote for the completeness or authoritativeness of an article.

Two comments: 
* An old suggestion is magic non-displaying "[[Category:XXX]]" links 
that could be put in articles to put them in a category.
* One nice thing that can be done with the dumb lists is to link to 
not-yet-created articles, effectively creating category-based to-do lists.

 Regards,

Neil