On Mon, Feb 25, 2008 at 12:32 PM, Simetrical Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com wrote:
In this case, I'm not sure we need an interface for this on the page at all. Instead, the page can be seen as a member of a category by looking at the category page. This is very reasonable for maintenance categories, where you usually don't need to know that a given article is tagged for cleanup if you're just reading it: the purpose of the category is to allow people to systematically go through all articles in the category, via the category page. Adding a button to show the hidden categories adds interface clutter and partially reintroduces the confusion for ordinary readers that the goal of hidden categories is to remove.
In some cases, furthermore, the reason for hiding categories may be that there are dozens of them, which repeat information already contained in displayed categories, and which are therefore useless for everyone -- see the proposal made a couple of days ago here to use this to increase the number of "manual category intersections" like "American artists", and have the visible categories be only atomic categories like "United States citizens" and "Artists". In this use case, any option to display all the categories on the page would just display a complete mess, and would be useless for anyone.
So I would say that __HIDDENCAT__ should just be hidden for now, period, no interface to display it. As time progresses and people start using the feature extensively, if people report that some additional level of display would be useful, we can discuss that then.
Well, it seems that Tim disagrees with this.