On 8/12/06, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Other than closed lists like "Months of the year" which are essentially complete, and thus have minimal utility, many lists provide us with a dynamic presentation of things that still need to be done. If this results in a large degree of overlap with the contents of a category it's no big deal. The underlying premise that we should be eliminating lists is far from being broadly supported.
Lists are good. I'm not sure if I explained my idea clearly enough. I'm suggesting that instead of having a "list of X" on one page, and [[Category:X]] on another page, you simply put the "list of X" text up the top of the [[CategoryX]] page. That way, you gain the benefit of being able to painlessly add items to the "listory" (by the normal [[Category:X]] link), but you can also manually add new items, and reorganise existing items by editing the listory text.
It's fairly clear to me that the right solution would be a way of extending that [[Category:X]] link as follows: * Allow more information about the link. A meta-article category like "requests for photos" would be much more helpful if you could add arbitrary-length text like [[Category:Requests for photos:It should show the front of the building, including the famous statue]] when you put the link on some article talk page. Also useful for including footnotes justifying the page's inclusion in the category... * Allow entries in the category from pages other than the included page itself - basically, to allow red links. No idea what syntax would make sense... * Allowing greater control over layout on the category page. Consider all the lists we currently have, and whether those formats could be automatically generated somehow. What are the common threads? Presenting lists in tables, breaking lists up into groups, presenting several similar but discete categories on a single page...
I don't know if there are lists that simply could never work well as categories, but by making categories more powerful, we could certainly have less in that "category"...
Steve