View list of articles in subcategories all on one page
Problem: Many projects use categories in a sense where subcategories mean subsets of categories (in a mathematical way). Hence, articles in subcategories are actually content of the supercategory as well, but not sorted this way to gain better overview.
Who would benefit: Editors and readers trying to get an overview over the articles about a given topic.
Proposed solution: Add an option to show all pages and files in subcategories as well. There could maybe be a cache of this information, that is updated regularly or on categorization, to make this work reasonably well. Maybe this cache wouldn't have to contain all pages contained in a category or its subsets, but only subcategories. A limit of a few 10 000 pages could make sure that the amount of pages is manageable for the software with reasonable effort.
While this is a workaroung, it doesn't provide the same user experience as category pages. It's a bit like suggesting to drop category pages entirely, as you can use incategory seacrhing instead. --MGChecker (talk) 21:56, 31 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Could you share some examples of categories with subcategories used in the way you describe? It might help others, including me, better understand this proposal's goals. AEzell (WMF) (talk) 19:33, 31 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
While enwiki doesn't use categories this way, dewikis whole category system is organized this way. It might be more useful to provide an example for what would be never done there: en:Köln-Düsseldorfer is indirectly part of en:Category:Rivers of Switzerland, even though it is neither a river nor in Switzerland. This leads to two concepts roughly translatable as "Topic category" and "Object category", where the latter is only allowed to contain articles that satisfy d:Property:P31: „Article is a Category“. en:Category:Rivers of Switzerland wouldn't be allowed to contain articles that aren't rivers of Switzerland, not even in subcategories. Using a system like this for categories renders viewing lists of articles in subcategories all on one page much more useful than it would be in enwiki. --MGChecker (talk) 21:56, 31 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I would like to make sure I understand this proposal MGChecker. On en.wiki, as I'm sure you know, subcategories do not inherit from supercategories. So, paradoxically, the broader the category one searches by, the fewer results one gets. E.g., a search by Category:Rivers of the United States would find almost no actual river articles—and any it did find would turn up only because they were mis-categorized (because they should have been filed in various sub-categories). So are you saying 1) that you want to change the category system so that articles in subcategories do inherit from parent categories? Or are you saying 2) that you want a special page that shows you a hierarchically organized view of categories and subcategories, where each is subcategory openable so that you can see the actual articles in the subcategory, instead of simply seeing a count of them, as now? —JMatazzoni (WMF) (talk) 00:56, 2 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
With this proposal I want 1, but you would be free to chose: There should be a button to chose between these two modes so everyone who is happy with the current system won't complain. --MGChecker (talk) 23:05, 13 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
This would not really be a solution, as this isn't about the subcat structure itself, but about the articles in there. You would gain the possibility to view the articles/files in a category and its subcategories at the same time without the need to use Cirrus. --MGChecker (talk) 23:05, 13 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Support Moer useful than Community Wishlist Survey 2019/Categories/Button to show subcategories because it would actually include the contents of the subcat itself. Use-case would be when I want to find a picture of a certain kind of animal or plant, I might not care which exact species, subspecies, breed or cultivar it is, so I would like a larger display of the higher-level cat rather than having to look at each specific (sub-)subcat separately even if I could see a list of all those subcats. DMacks (talk) 19:10, 26 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Support {Seeing that 'division' of 'subject matter' benefits ONLY when there is overview simply 'drawn' (i.e. the legend on the 'map') then individual studies become truly an area of interest rather than singular area they become part of one beautiful 'picture' -- Just my 2 cents-- }} 7petal1stalk (talk) 19:57, 27 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Support ديفيد عادل وهبة خليل 2 (talk) 09:09, 17 November 2018 (UTC)