Last modified: 2011-03-13 18:04:41 UTC
Categories with limited scope could categorize sub-pages of a page but be restricted in visibility to these sub-pages. This could be useful in wikiversity, e.g. for a category "Exercises" to a lesson or course. Sub-pages would only appear with the name of the sub-page itself in such a category. A special syntax could allow access from outside the scope: [[Category://<scope identifier (e.g. page name)>.<category name>]]
Why not just use [[Category:Physics 101 exercises]] or whatever? We definitely don't need a new syntax for this.
Admittedly it is just syntactic sugar. I had several collisions already (not in wikiversity) where I would have liked to use the same name for different categories and at the same time didn't want to make category names arbitrarily long. As an example: http://education.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Learning_environment_computer_science would initially have been a category "computer science" only visible to educational software. In the same wiki there is a need for a category "computer science" for school subjects. For educational software I use a lot of categories (a tendency which will probably increase even further) so keeping the category names shorter becomes important and I don't want to use abbreviations (Category:LECS ? - so what?) Without generated intersections for categories (Bug #5244) I have to give longer names to categories that seem inevitable for navigation. There are other applications where I could imagine that this would be quite useful (e.g. wikiversity)
On the whole, the better solution to this problem would be to allow intersecting queries, as bug 5244 requests, thus I'm closing this in favour of that. I don't think it's a great idea to add complexity to an already overloaded syntax, and I'm doubtful that the work this requires has a great benefit for the software overall.
