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Page-category mapping feature
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Description

Author: catlow

Description:
There's a perennial problem over what to do with "eponymous categories" - whether (for example) "Category:London" should be assigned as a "subcategory" of "Category:English cities", and if it is, whether "London" should then be taken out of the latter category (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Categorization/Eponymous_RFC for a discussion that shows there's currently no entirely satisfactory solution). Anyway, the problem would largely go away if the following feature could be implemented, and I wonder if it would be feasible.

The idea is that we could "map" a page to a distinguished category (for example, the syntax [[Category:Xxx| ]] with a space sortkey would cause that category to be the distinguished category for the current page, say [[Xxx]]). This would have two effects (besides placing the page in the category as now):

  1. on the [[Category:Xxx]] page, an additional category box would appear containing the "Categories for Xxx", i.e. the categories to which [[Xxx]] has been assigned, even though Category:Xxx itself has not been assigned to them;
  2. on any other category containing [[Xxx]], there would be a category expand button (a + sign or something) next to Xxx on the list of pages, which would expand to the category tree for Category:Xxx (thus allowing access to Category:Xxx from every category containing Xxx without the need to make it a "subcategory" of all those categories).

I know it sounds complicated, but I can assure you it would make this functionality much slicker for both editors and viewers.


Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement

Details

Reference
bz19281

Event Timeline

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Low.Nov 21 2014, 10:42 PM
bzimport set Reference to bz19281.
bzimport added a subscriber: Unknown Object (MLST).

warlord-john wrote:

This sounds to me like a very good way to address a problem which is particularly troublesome in the English wikipedia. I would very much welcome seeing it enacted.

It might be helpful to have a mock-up (aka pictures) of what your suggesting. (To be honest, this is something that's probably not going to happen in the near future unless someone submits a patch, but being able to see what the ui would look like visually might help to convince others this is a good idea).

Aklapper changed the subtype of this task from "Task" to "Feature Request".Feb 4 2022, 11:01 AM
Aklapper removed a subscriber: wikibugs-l-list.