Prevent draftspace pages from being placed in article categories
Problem: Per w:WP:DRAFTNOCAT (and equivalent policies and guidelines at other wikis/language editions), draft pages are not supposed to be placed in article categories. However, many newcomers are unaware of this. Further, many experienced editors choose to ignore it. As a result, volunteers have to go around regularly manually disabling categories on drafts.
Proposed solution: This task could be integrated into the software. In an ideal application, all categories in a draft would be automatically wrapped in the draft categories template by the software, without the need to do anything to the wikitext. Exceptions should be made for Category:Wikipedia drafts and its subcategories.
Who would benefit: This would eliminate a task for patrollers, reduce confusion for newcomers, eliminate the chance readers come across a miscategorized draft while browsing categories, and allow for easier category work on drafts for all editors.
Question: @Sdkb: What is an "article category" - that is how are such categories programmatically identified such that something new could filter them? If that doesn't exist, it seems like a companion wish may be needed - something like Create a "content category" marking. — xaosfluxTalk14:51, 26 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Sdkb: so some sort of on-wiki list is what you envision? This feels like the type of work that would be be applicable to wiki's in general - not some sort of "English Wikipedia" only solution. Think this would still need some sort of metadata attached to categories to be done first. — xaosfluxTalk16:28, 26 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I think the proposal linked by Izno would be a good way to implement this that'd also allow for some other things. If the coordinators want to merge this proposal to that one for the !voting, that'd be fine. {{u|Sdkb}}talk16:43, 26 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Sdkb: I was thinking about this a bit more - think it can maybe be generalized some which could allow for a reusable solution. First, want to make sure any restatement still is aligned with your user story:"Prevent draftspace pages from being placed in article categories". We already have a technical concept of "Content Namespaces", on most projects this is just "NS_MAIN" (ns:0) (The (article) namespace on the English Wikipedia). Projects can add more namespaces to this if they have a need (e.g. if enwiki wanted to include the "Portal" namespace they could). Perhaps a magic word could be added to categories, something like __CONTENTCATEGORY__ - and then any namespace that wasn't a "content namespace" (from enwiki for example "Draft" "user talk" "wikipedia") could suppress any categories that were labeled as CONTENTCATEGORY. That might not be too hard from a back-end technology side, however it does require that a project actually tag all of the categories that they wanted to be treated like this. Just spitballing. — xaosfluxTalk14:21, 27 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose; seems like an oddly specific proposal to me. Not all drafts are in draftspace, there'd be quite a few exceptions (such as maintenance categories), and not all wikis have the policy to keep drafts out of article categories. Jochem van Hees (talk) 17:28, 31 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support As someone who has made a draft complete with categories (groan). To (partly) resolve the issue raised in the oppose vote above, each wiki can turn it on as needed. It isn't a complete solution (as pointed out, userpace drafts would still be an issue), but will definitely help. Mako001 (talk) 03:36, 5 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Question: @Sdkb: What is an "article category" - that is how are such categories programmatically identified such that something new could filter them? If that doesn't exist, it seems like a companion wish may be needed - something like Create a "content category" marking. — xaosflux Talk 14:51, 26 January 2022 (UTC)
Support --NGC 54 (talk｜contribs) 23:06, 28 January 2022 (UTC)
Oppose; seems like an oddly specific proposal to me. Not all drafts are in draftspace, there'd be quite a few exceptions (such as maintenance categories), and not all wikis have the policy to keep drafts out of article categories. Jochem van Hees (talk) 17:28, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
