Last modified: 2014-01-28 05:52:50 UTC
It would be great to have a flag like the minor changes flag, except for categorization work. Categorizing takes so many minor changes, it would be very helpful if there was a way to filter them out.
I think this would be an unnecessary complication; "minor" and the edit summary already cover explaining that it's a trivial categorization edit and hence people uninterested can skip over it easily enough.
It's the ability to ''automtically'' hide them that I would like. People use various different ways of explaining that something is categorizing work ("cat", "category", etc.), and sometimes they use the minor changes flag, but sometimes they don't. If there was a seperate flag, it would be clearer, and unless you worked on categorizing it wouldn't affect you at all.
I think the problem is we could end up with a whole proliferation of "flags" of this sort, and a) RecentChanges and page history displays would be cluttered up with them and b) people would simply not bother using them. Indeed, if there are already people failing to use the "minor edit" flag for minor categorization edits, what makes you think they'll remember to tick one called "categorization edit"? Or are you proposing (as others have) that this be an automatic test, in which case what exactly would that test be? Now I think about it, there can be such a thing as a major edit that only adds or changes a category - it could be controversial, or it could even be vandalism. So I'm not sure "categorization" would be a good category of edits to seperate out.
How about automatic edit summary, the same way section headers are automatically entered now: Could the software detect if the ONLY thing a person enters is a [[Category:]] or a {{template}} tag, and enter that tag text into the edit summary? Not only would it make it quicker for those doing categorization work, it would make a consistent format that is as easy to recognize on Recent Changes as a flag, and perhaps more easy to filter either by us or by external bookmarklets and such.
Ok, let me try to be more specific. People currently start category-related edit summaries with the word "cat". I would like a way to hide those items, or show only them, as a way of dividing my watchlist. I can, and I will, write a javascript bookmarklet to do this, but it would be more useful and easier for other people to use if it was added to Mediawiki. That would not require any more flags for people to pay attention to than they already do, and it would not make controversial items any more likely to be missed; it would just add technical support for an existing practice. Regarding the idea of automatic insertion of the word "cat" if only category items are entered, that's a good idea, also. It could also be implemented by a bookmarklet, but people would have to click it everytime the saved a page(AFAIK, now) as there is no way to automatically call a bookmarklet(if anyone knows how, _*please*_ let me know).
Automatic edit summaries seems like a good idea, but it involves running a diff between the previous and current version, extracting what's changed, trying to work out what that is, and then changing the edit summary. It seems a lot of work for a small benefit, especially since you'd be leaving the edit summary blank and then just hoping your change met the criteria that caused it to automatically fill in the sumary for you. As I see it, the real problem is that categories are meta-data that shouldn't be in the article text to start with ...
It could be possible to implement this (if enough people find it useful & have enough time...) by having an edit-link for categories just like the section-edit links. In the ideal world, all category tags would be lumped up somewhere at the end and it might be easy to be able to edit just them. But in real life, there might be articles with category tags in all places.
Hey it just occured to me. If one is just going to add a category/template tag (and isn't bothered about existing tags), one would just append whatever tags one wants to the page. An ideal use of "action=edit§ion=new". Hence, I'd suggest an "append a tag" link to non-talk pages similar to the "post-a-comment" link to talk-pages, with the edit summary prefilled with "/* tag */" or something. The editor could still choose whether to mark the edit as minor, of course.
That will be trivially fixed the day we get interwikis and categories links out of article. We can have two edit mode: _ one for the article text _ one for the metadatas
[Removing RESOLVED LATER as discussed in http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2012-November/064240.html . Reopening and setting priority to "Lowest". For future reference, please use either RESOLVED WONTFIX (for issues that will not be fixed), or simply set lowest priority. Thanks a lot!]
