Topic on Talk:Edit Review Improvements/New filters for edit review

These new Watchlist filters are great, but what I'd really love is also to be able to filter by Category. Tools like HotCat are able to do autocomplete on category names, so I assume that wouldn't be too hard?

See phab:T163433. Help:New filters for edit review/Advanced filters says that it's "Coming in later (not scheduled)".

First steps for filtering by categories are an ongoing work, through a Google Summer of Code project.

Yes, you are in luck @Steven Walling. That feature will be available later this summer. As you probably know, categories are not a perfect technology, so the feature will have limitations (e.g., the broader the category, the fewer the results—contrary to most normal systems). Our assumption is that users will be able to get around some of this by using Saved Filters (bookmarking) with multiple categories included.

We will be very curious to learn how the feature works for you—keep us posted!

I would be really interested in a filter-by-category as well, even more so in a filter-by-NOT-category. Wonder what @JMatazzoni means by "the broader the category, the fewer the results", though... Even if a filter by category is tough, if there was a way to use categories in the highlighting that would be helpful.

@Tenbergen, if you filter a big, parent category (like "Science" or "History"), you will get fewer results than in a specific category like (fictional examples) "Mono-cellular organism" or "History of France during 19th century". That's due to two factors:

1. broad categories tent to only list other categories (Science category on English Wikipedia has 34 categories and 18 pages)
2. the more you sub-categories you explore, the more exponentiel are the results. Display all those results is not technically manageable so only pages directly in the category you search would be displayed (can be zero; would be 18 for the "category:science" example).

Thank you for the example. I mostly use mediawiki in a private wiki, and for various reasons we usually have a page in its category, and its subcategory. (I understand that is not how it's done on wikipedia...). In our setting, then, if I had a change in a page in both "science" and "monocellular", and asked RC to restrict to category "science", the page would be listed, correct? In other words, the reason for fewer pages being listed is simply that the filter would only list pages in the category, not in its subcategories?

As far as I know, for now, nothing has been decided about that. I think it should be configurable per wiki to fit your case.

What Trizek says is correct. But to clarify one of his statements:

> Display all those results is not technically manageable

He means as a standard feature of the search. I.e., we can't make it so that search routinely includes two or three levels of subcategories for each category you include, because the results would quickly get out of control. However, it will be possible for you to use bookmarking/Saved Filters to create searches of groups of categories. This seems like a viable strategy and we will be very interested to see how it works in practice.