Last modified: 2011-03-13 18:05:09 UTC
Consider adding a recursive mode to list=categorymembers, allowing to easily go done a whole category tree with the API. Especially on enwiki, categories are linked deep; there is no [[Category:Women]] where all women would be in, for example...
(In reply to comment #0) > Consider adding a recursive mode to list=categorymembers, allowing to easily go > done a whole category tree with the API. > Such a recursive mode would require a huge number of queries to be run which each return a huge number of results for enwiki-size categories (think [[Category:Living people]]) only to throw away most of the results to satisfy the limit. If you really need this recursive tree thing, you can easily do it on the client side. Of course that would take a lot of requests and a lot of time for a big category, but that's exactly why I won't implement it on the server side: while it's OK for your bot to take ages building a huge list, an enwiki server can't really do anything that would take longer than a few seconds. > Especially on enwiki, categories are linked deep; there is no > [[Category:Women]] where all women would be in, for example... > Some wikis actually do 'overcategorize' articles, putting an article like [[John F. Kennedy]] in all of [[Category:1963 deaths]], [[Category:1960s deaths]], [[Category:20th century deaths]] and [[Category:Deceased people]], even though the first one implies all the other ones. enwiki doesn't do this, though, and AFAIK all other WMF wikis don't either.
