Talk:Community Wishlist/Wishes/Category tree should be an acyclic graph

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How

How would you scan for category cycles in real-time? It's important that people are able to quickly add categories so one would probably have only around 1 second per category – it's probably even needed that this is somehow cached so how would you technically roughly implement this?

I don't think there's a way to show a warning to the user that the category addition means it will cause a cycle.

Even if there was a way for that (if that's what you mean here), then the category added may be placed correctly while the category somewhere else is the flawed one.

Also see c:Commons:Database reports/Category cycles and consider that it currently has over 30 k cycles.

If somebody knows a way to solve this issue on WMC, please comment or make a proposal. Maybe a bot could solve most of these but I don't know how that could be done. In regards to your proposal I think it would make most sense to inhibit more cycles once at least the number of existing ones is low. Sadly I don't see technical way for that and users may not be able to fix the situation at another category themselves so preventing the cat-change or asking the user to fix the cat-cycle may often be inappropriate. Prototyperspective (talk) 18:46, 22 October 2024 (UTC)