Last modified: 2005-03-27 20:28:52 UTC
Categories should display breadcrumb navigation of their supercategories. There are a few issues here that would have to be decided: 1. How many categories do you go back? 2. How do you deal with a broad category tree? Example: Category:Canadian ice hockey Team sports < Ice hockey < Ice hockey by country Winter sports < | Olympic sports < | Hockey < | | Sports < Sports by country < Categories by country < As you can see, it can get a bit out of hand, though I think a formula can be developed taking into account the breath, depth, and total number of categories displayed to balance the number of categories displayed without being overwhelming. This is the web: we should take advantage of its non-linearity. The category system is in its infancy, as far as I'm concerned. This is related to bug 1497.
I just realized that example wasn't even complete. This is a tough usability challenge since the tree grows very fast, but I think that even expanding the direct supercategories is a benefit.
I can perhaps see some usefulness for something like this as a "special:" page (something like "what links here"), but to somehow incorporate it into each category page would really clutter the user interface, and might add too much load.
There is a category browser in MediaWiki already, please not it is not set on wikipedia for performance reasons. In LocalSettings.php : $wgUseCategoryBrowser = true;
