On 8/21/06, Steve Bennett stevage@gmail.com wrote:
On 8/21/06, Ligulem ligulem@pobox.com wrote:
Thanks for the responses. So this is not a technical problem then. I just wonder what's the benefit of having such huge categories...
I thought categories were meant as a tool for editors to iterate over the articles contained in them. I can't imagine that a human would ever iterate over a set of 20K pages (at least not without using specialized tools like AWB [1] or bots).
There are several distinct uses of categories: a) To allow human readers to browse related articles b) To organise articles for future distribution, publishing etc c) To assist quality control, such as labelling articles that need cleanup etc d) To assow bots to work some kind of magic.
I've been thinking for some weeks or more now that a good feature to improve the usefulness of large categories would be "Random article in this category". I would be excellent for maintainence where nobody is going to iterate through the whole lot but does like to try to keep order etc.
Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail)
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