Talk:Community Wishlist/W225

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Advanced mode

The advanced mode in the settings of the mobile view gives access to categories, also HotCat is supported. Sjoerd de Bruin (talk) 11:46, 7 August 2024 (UTC)

Thanks @Sjoerddebruin - @Plogeo - would this work for you? JWheeler-WMF (talk) 21:54, 21 August 2024 (UTC)

Yes. Thank you very much! Plogeo (talk) 07:23, 22 August 2024 (UTC)

This is not a solution! Most users don't know about this and afaik this can only used when signed in. That may be a workaround that works for this particular user but hiding categories on mobile, which is probably how most users access Wikimedia sites by now, is unacceptable and unreasonable. It is disrespectful of the large amount of work volunteers have put into organizing files via categories and denies mobile users access to these very useful links, for example to find more media about a subject on Wikimedia Commons. This has been the most supported request in WMC's technical needs survey. Showing categories on mobile as well also outside the apps is urgent and could be done with relatively low effort (just don't hide/suppress these links in the mobile view). Prototyperspective (talk) 13:03, 27 August 2024 (UTC)

I'm relying with my volunteer hat as this comment should not be taken as an official WMF response.

This wish was also the #3 most-supported wish in the 2023 survey. As you can tell from reading the comments in phab:T24660, the suggestion was to start with phab:T152199. Community Tech followed up on that and was ready to implement it, but were instructed not to. All I can do is point you to the official response in our August 8, 2023 update, and encourage interested users to vote on this wish in order to get more attention on it.

Finally, I want to make it clear what the status means. If you haven't already, please review Community Wishlist/FAQ#What is a wish status? for the descriptions of each status. The short versus long-term opportunities are not about technical difficulty or feasibility, rather it's about the commitment to revisit the wish. Related: I am going to implement tooltips for the status chips, so soon you can just hover over the status to see what they mean! :)

Hope this helps! Again, the above should not be viewed as a WMF response, as I cannot speak for the Web team or other decision-makers regarding this wish. — MusikAnimal ^talk 17:38, 11 October 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for the links and the contextual historical information. I already subscribed to these code issues and commented there. The explanation about the wish status doesn't ease my – I'll be honest – unease, anger and frustration because even when that doesn't mean that this is considered a long-term highly-difficult thing, that there is low commitment to it is absolutely unacceptable. Just because currently WMF is the only non-profit organization hosting editable full Wikipedia doesn't mean it should make the worst of decisions clearly against the community, apparently against common sense, and without explanation.

This is just asking for a few hyperlinks that already display on desktop to also be displayed on mobile; it's not really even something to implement but rather some active hiding of these links to undo.

There is no explanation at We hoped to implement Display the categories on the mobile site for everyone – after completing the Better Diffs wish. Unfortunately, our key partner, the Web team, will not tackle this wish now. The importance of categories to readers must be researched further to prioritize this wish instead of other pending wishes. and the issues themselves also don't have any explanation as far as I can see. Maybe Google asked Wikimedia not to show these categories or showing them has a bad impact of Web search indexing or somebody wants to actively harm Wikimedia or something else – I have no idea. Regardless what it is, categories should definitely be shown – they are super useful and the result of gigantic volunteer effort, not just on Wikipedia but also on Commons. I think this was already high up in earlier Wishlist and if it's been as high up as #3 in 2023 and #1 in Commons in 2024 then community stance and prioritization and voting doesn't seem to play any role. The key point of course is not the effort that went into building the category trees (albeit that has implications for active disrespect of the volunteers who are doing that) but the enormous usefulness of these categories which don't need any research to spend a negligible amount of time to simply show a few hyperlinks on the page, especially since there are many proven use-cases of categories such as browsing articles of a given topic and statistics. Adding hyperlinks to a page is a matter of minutes to hours normally and even if that's more, it's more than worth it for implementing the consensus community will alone already, even when leaving out the usefulness (and categories need to be seen to be used more and are also useful when the category page isn't clicked as structured metadata to glance over). The thing that needs research is where and how WMF as organization (the organization and its relevant decision-makers and structure etc, not individual employees) is obstructing success of Wikimedia and what can be done about it in my opinion.

Please let me know if you have further information regarding why this is not being implemented and what could be done about it other than voting again on it which already proved itself to be ineffective. Prototyperspective (talk) 18:13, 14 October 2025 (UTC)