User:Gadget850/Categories

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This is an essay; it contains the advice and/or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. It is not a policy or guideline, and editors are not obliged to follow it.

[edit] Categories are not that important- today

Currently, the category system is somewhat primitive. Although categories are acyclical, when viewing categories a user can only drill up or down in a tree hierarchy, thus there is no real way to form relationships between articles. For performance reasons, only 200 entries are shown at a time in a category, a further limitation. Current tools such as CatScan can show simple relationships, but still use a tree format.

[edit] Categories can be important- tomorrow

The Wikipedia:Category intersection feature request is quite interesting, and if fully implemented will provide fully relational intersections. Other extensions such as Wgraph into such a system could easily add very powerful features. This system will require a major overhaul to the way categories are implemented.