Topic on User talk:Roan Kattouw (WMF)

Hi!

What do you think about moving the categories out of the editable area?

Currently, categories are allowed anywhere in the wikitext (there can be non-category wikitext between two categories), formatted in any way (there can be two categories in one line). Wouldn't it be nicer if the categories were moved out of the editable area altogether? That way, there can be an underlying structure that allows for nice programming (HotCat wouldn't have to be 123kb), and end users would never be in contact with the underlying code for the categories. They would just change, add and remove the categories they want.

The way I see it, there are three reasons why this would be desirable:

1. It would be easier for end users to get and set categories.
2. It would reduce edit conflicts: Diligent patrollers like adding categories to new pages immediately as they are created, and new users like making many small edits. See the problem here?
3. It would completely erase edits like changing "category:Blah" to "Category:Blah".

What do you think?

I agree that that would be a good thing to do, and there are some old tasks for this in Phabricator (T2167, T2201, T29312 and probably others that I can't find right now). The reason those tasks are so old (and their numbers so low) is because this is a difficult problem. There's an RfC for "multi-content revisions" that may address this problem, along with many other things, but that's a big chunk of work and will probably take a long time.