Wikipedia talk:Category math feature

Discuss, don't vote. WP:VIE. >Radiant< 15:34, 5 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, but straw polls are just to gauge opinions (Wikipedia:Straw polls). -- Zondor 15:41, 5 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, but you need to get some people to express opinions first, otherwise the situation will escalate into a "for-against" segregation on one particular point, instead of working on a compromise (for instance, the "requests for rollback" poll has backfired severely). Note that this feature already exists (it works in WikiNews) but it is disabled on Wikipedia. You may want to ask the devs why; there may be server load issues etc. >Radiant< 15:44, 5 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
- Moved to talk... -- Zondor 15:46, 5 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I'd love this feature. However, I also see a need to include the "category and all subcategories" operator: Category:Norwegians/with_sub & Category:Computer scientists. Perhaps even the default should be "with_sub" - the category of Norwegians who haven't been subclassified further is a pretty boring/useless category. A number of subcategory trees would be unneccessary with this feature, but I'm pretty sure some would remain. --Alvestrand 13:32, 10 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Straw poll

This is a straw poll. Sign your vote below.

Support. Categories then need not be so specific, awkwardly long and esoteric, making the organisation so much better. -- Zondor 15:04, 5 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Support. Many of the discussion on categorisation project could be eliminated using this feature. Not so keen on the name, confusing with mathematical topics. --Salix alba (talk) 19:13, 5 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Conditional Support. I would like to see an assessment of the resources required by this proposal by someone involved in either the coding of Mediawiki or the Wikimedia server management. BigBlueFish 13:21, 6 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
- Perhaps the use of lightweight tags rather than categories can avoid stress on the servers. -- Zondor 03:55, 7 February 2006 (UTC) Categories are somewhat rather useless anyway because of its wiki description. -- Zondor 03:59, 7 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Support, also with reservations about the feature's name. Perhaps something like "Category intersection" or "Category overlap" might be more intuitive, if overly specific or technically inaccurate. Feature seems a good idea though! David Kernow 18:33, 11 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Weak support If this idea actually worked as proposed, it would be a wonderful idea. However, as with other voters, I would need to know how it would affect performance etc. before I could put full support behind it. Chairman S. 01:54, 12 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Questions. How would we transitition into it, what with the resulting broken links?--Urthogie 16:25, 12 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Conditional Support. I believe two things are necessary. First, expert attention must be given to a user-friendly interface. Second, BigBlueFish is absolutely right about a cost/benefit assessment. PhatJew 09:01, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Conditional Support. Same perf issues as people have asked about above. My hunch is that for relatively simple operations like "in cat A and cat B", it wouldn't be that big of a performance crunch. Assuming that categories are stored in a sane way, it's certainly no more complex than search. Has anyone asked Brion about this? --Dantheox 21:22, 18 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Neutral the idea is a very solid one, and would fix a lot of the issues with the current categorization system. However the interface and implementation is really the crucial factor; any change would have to be to a categorization system that is at least as intuitive as the current one, and making this feature the same would be very tricky. As it stands there are only a very few intersections that are truly useful (by nationality or location, for example) and if it takes more than one or two clicks to get to said category intersection from an article then this feature would be unnecessary clutter. Ziggurat 00:49, 20 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Yes Please even pretty please. Look at how much this would simplify John Lennon, for only one example of where it would be enormously useful. Septentrionalis 01:16, 25 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Neutral per Ziggurat. If I intersect "Films" and "History" will I get films about history, or the history of films? If we don't want to lose quality of classification we will have to keep more subcategories than we imagine: and we'll have to keep defending them on CfD from people who think that category math has obsoleted them. Plus, if all those cats that John Lennon is in are worth having as cats, then I want them all to be one-click accessible from John Lennon. So what was the advantage, again? —Blotwell 09:05, 28 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
- History is ambiguous so it can mean about history or historical. It needs to be defined or use more specific ones like 1970s or even more specific. -- Zondor 04:26, 1 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]