Community Wishlist/Focus areas/Category presentation
Description
Volunteers want to better organize and sort categories on Wikipedia articles, to improve ease of accessing and organizing information.
Categories are used to help Wikipedia readers find articles by topic, and also to help contributors manage maintenance backlogs. Some volunteers have expressed that the presentation of categories can interrupt flow and cause confusion. Specifically, we’ve seen volunteers ask to group hidden categories to better organize and understand how an article is used, as well as better organization of topic categories. Additionally, the use of categories is limited on mobile, making them harder to manage.
Other details
Last updated: 16:06, 1 January 2025 (UTC)
Created: 20:23, 20 December 2024 (UTC)
Wishes in this focus area
Below is a list of wishes that have informed this focus area. More wishes may be added to this table over time. Voting for the focus area is not a guarantee that each wish will be explicitly delivered; rather, the wishes are suggestive of the problem at large. Once a focus area is adopted, the respective team will work alongside communities to prioritize and deliver on the most impactful solutions.
| Wish | Phabricator tasks | Type | Projects | Date (UTC) | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hidden Categories Grouping | Feature request | All projects | March 27, 2025 | Open | |
| Sorting of Categories | Feature request | Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons | December 20, 2024 | Open | |
| Sorting of a page's categories | Feature request | Wikipedia | December 20, 2024 | Open |
Voting
This area currently has 1 supporter. Voting for this area is open until it is completed. Show your support using the button below.
Supporters of this area
Support Paloi Sciurala (talk) 01:32, 4 March 2025 (UTC) Categories are, unfortunately, quite invisible to readers.- @Paloi Sciurala: Very much agree. Mainly or first of all, undoing the hiding of categories on mobile is the top wish in the Commons technical needs survey and I think it was high up in prior Wishlists and well-supported at phab:T24660. It's a quick and easy to make change and I think the WMF has no right to hide the categories from many users. However, this focus area doesn't seem to be about that. None of the wishes is about that and I support none of the wishes in it. Prototyperspective (talk) 00:42, 11 March 2025 (UTC)
- @Prototyperspective: I do not think they are very visible on desktop, either. --Paloi Sciurala (talk｜contribs) 14:52, 11 March 2025 (UTC)
- Agree on that as well. I think it's two steps: 1. Undo the hiding (see code issue) 2. Make them more visible (in the preferences I made it so they show at the top of the page; I think it would be best if by default they showed right underneath the File information template). Prototyperspective (talk) 15:08, 11 March 2025 (UTC)
- @Prototyperspective: I do not think they are very visible on desktop, either. --Paloi Sciurala (talk｜contribs) 14:52, 11 March 2025 (UTC)
- @Paloi Sciurala: Very much agree. Mainly or first of all, undoing the hiding of categories on mobile is the top wish in the Commons technical needs survey and I think it was high up in prior Wishlists and well-supported at phab:T24660. It's a quick and easy to make change and I think the WMF has no right to hide the categories from many users. However, this focus area doesn't seem to be about that. None of the wishes is about that and I support none of the wishes in it. Prototyperspective (talk) 00:42, 11 March 2025 (UTC)