[Wikipedia-l] Categories: An implementation

[Neil Harris]

Magnus Manske wrote:

>
> Categories are my implementation of the filtering issue, something 
> that would be quite difficult with lists. It could also work to tag 
> images as "GFDL", "public domain" or "fair use". It can also replace 
> the lists. So, if we implement a filtering option anyway, why not use 
> the opportunity?
>
> Magnus


Magnus,

My comments were not meant to criticise categories, or your attempts to 
make an implementation.  I'm a proponent of categories: I think they can 
serve useful purposes. I'm also grateful you are actually exploring the 
problem space, instead of just talking about it like the rest of us.

I think the [[List of XXX topics]] categories are very useful, and 
having a pointer from the category list to the article is the natural 
way to do it: it also handles the case of making a category for a 
non-existent article.

But it would also be nice to flag an article for membership in a 
category list by adding a back-link.

The huge maths topics article shows that the "flat article" approach 
does not scale well for very large lists: there are two possible routes 
to making this better:
either

i: fixing the scaling problem for articles with very large lists of 
links, or
ii: a special implementation for category lists

Neil