On 8/10/06, Sebastian Moleski sebmol@gmail.com wrote:
I'm not aware of any such discussions but I can tell you that these two categories, and categories like it, are not a local problem. On German Wikipedia, we have these very same discussions over and over again without much of a resolution. If you find anything, let us know because we're looking for solutions too.
Well, my initial thought is to replace categories with something along the lines of "edit-time updated lists", by which I mean that adding a category tag to a page would update not just that page but also an "index" page (for lack of a better term) that is essentially a cached version of the category page. This way, loading the index page wouldn't incur any extra database hits, and the index page would be designed such that annotations and references could be added.
Implementation-wise, the code would need to recognize presence of the category tag and update the corresponding index page appropriately. This would complicate page updates slightly, but not overly so. In order to allow for rearranging and annotating the index page itself, code would need to be added that checked for the presence of a link (on the index page) back to the article.
Alternately, the index page could be an entirely different kind of structure than a regular wiki page, and the presence of links could be checked by some more efficient mechanism. This might needlessly complicate the editing of index pages, however.
This would basically combine the features of a list with the features of a category, and improve the load-time efficiency at the expense of a slight decrease in edit-time efficiency (which I think would probably be a big win overall).
These are just my initial thoughts and I'm certainly open to suggestions or objections.
-Bill Clark