Last modified: 2011-03-13 18:05:03 UTC

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Bug 15088 - Categories should not be able to include themselves
Categories should not be able to include themselves
Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX
Product: MediaWiki
Classification: Unclassified
Categories (Other open bugs)
unspecified
All All
: Lowest trivial (vote)
: ---
Assigned To: Nobody - You can work on this!
:
: 2132 (view as bug list)
Depends on:
Blocks:
  Show dependency treegraph
 
Reported: 2008-08-08 13:49 UTC by Happy-melon
Modified: 2011-03-13 18:05 UTC (History)
5 users (show)

See Also:
Web browser: ---
Mobile Platform: ---
Assignee Huggle Beta Tester: ---


Attachments

Description Happy-melon 2008-08-08 13:49:59 UTC
Eg [[Category:Atheist Wikipedians]] on en.wiki.  Because the userboxes which categorise into that category are demonstrated on the page, the category is listed as its own parent and subcat.  Surely these should just not appear?
Comment 1 Mike.lifeguard 2008-08-08 13:51:53 UTC
You can use noinclude and parserfunctions or a parameter to avoid this issue. Though it /would/ be nice to have for other situations.
Comment 2 Aryeh Gregor (not reading bugmail, please e-mail directly) 2008-08-08 13:54:30 UTC
Some categories might reasonably include themselves.  For instance, [[Category:Meta-categories]], [[Category:Hidden categories]].  This restriction should be enforced by editors on a case-by-case basis as appropriate, not universally by the software.  Suggest WONTFIX.
Comment 3 Happy-melon 2008-08-08 13:58:22 UTC
I thought an important design-feature of the Category: structure was to avoid circular loops and branches that later merge.  Being effectively a length-1 loop, isn't this the worst possible situation? 

At the very least, shouldn't they be bolded like article self-links, rather than active internal links to the same page the user is on?
Comment 4 Happy-melon 2008-08-08 14:00:34 UTC
Oh, it also has amusing interactions with the CategoryTree extension:

[[Image:Recursiveness.png]] on en.wiki
Comment 5 Aryeh Gregor (not reading bugmail, please e-mail directly) 2008-08-08 14:03:09 UTC
(In reply to comment #3)
> I thought an important design-feature of the Category: structure was to avoid
> circular loops and branches that later merge.

No, we've never even attempted to ban those.  Loops are perfectly reasonable if the notion of "category" is as vague as ours is.  Members of a subcategory need not be logically members of the parent category as well, they can be subordinate in some vague fashion.  This means that loops are entirely reasonable.

> At the very least, shouldn't they be bolded like article self-links, rather
> than active internal links to the same page the user is on?

That would make sense, certainly, yes, but it's a different request.

(In reply to comment #4)
> Oh, it also has amusing interactions with the CategoryTree extension:
> 
> [[Image:Recursiveness.png]] on en.wiki

I had some recollection that CategoryTree was clever enough to avoid recursion.  Guess not.  That could be fixed too, but banning recursion is not on the table.
Comment 6 Chad H. 2008-08-08 14:06:35 UTC
There's a bug open about CategoryTree's infinite recursion that I opened a long time ago. I want to say it got closed, but I can't seem to dig it up at the moment.

Agree with Simetrical that the issue of "Categories being in themselves" isn't really a bug and should be WONTFIX'd. Bolding them sounds good though :-)
Comment 7 Siebrand Mazeland 2008-08-10 22:48:24 UTC
Close as WONTFIX per above discussion.
Comment 8 Alexandre Emsenhuber [IAlex] 2009-09-25 08:32:58 UTC
*** Bug 2132 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

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