[Wikipedia-l] Categories: An implementation

[Magnus Manske]

Erik Moeller wrote:

>>Currently, anyone can add and delete categories. I suggest that this will be
>>restricted to sysops later, as it will prevent a "category inflation",
>>    
>>
>
>Please, let's not have another ability that is restricted to sysops.  
>Wikipedia is supposed to be open.
>

Well, let's say we have carefully searched and tagged each and every
"sexually explicit" article in the 'pedia as such. Then user:Michael
(lacking a better example) comes along and deletes the category. All
work for nothing. All tags are gone.
Yes, in a perfect world we'd have undelete here as well, but limiting
access to sysops seems an acceptable intermediate solution as well.

>>Anyone can assign any article to any category,
>>    
>>
>
>How? I see no information on how to do this.
>
Next to "printable version", there's a link "Categories". Try that one.

>All in all, I obviously like my [[Category:Foo]] proposal more.
>
Been there, had it implemented. Long time ago (Phase II, IIRC). No want,
no need, too complicated. Gone now.
Really, I'm trying to get rid of the language links in the future, why
add another obstacle? It's a mess as it is ;-)

> I'm not  
>too worried about separating this kind of meta information from articles,  
>IMHO it belongs there. This makes all changes to the categorization
>- listed in recent changes
>- diffable
>- easy to revert
>It would also be trivial to use the existing links tables for category  
>management under that scheme.
>
Most of this only shows that we need to improve Recent Changes...
Seriously: diffable is no argument, if the article text is not changed
(as in my implementation). It should show on RC, but that's a problem
with RC, IMHO. Reverting is easy with my solution as well (try it).

>The reason interlanguage links are so annoying is not that they are mixed  
>with articles, but that they are needlessly redundant. I think someone  
>proposed an interesting solution to that problem a few months ago (hint,  
>hint).
>
I don't recall...
I still have the code of *my* implementation in the test wiki, if that's
what you mean. I just can't find the database structure anymore :-(

Magnus