Wikipedia talk:Merge for now

Discussion
I'm adding a "discussion" section to solicit feedback on the proposals above (from everyone, whether they wrote the proposal or are here because they clicked on the wrong wikilink). Hopefully this can kickstart the development of a solid, workable proposal? HouseBlastertalk 01:21, 26 November 2023 (UTC)


 * @HouseBlaster Thanks for picking this up! Not sure if this is a good place to have a discussion section though; shouldn't we do that at Wikipedia talk:Merge for now? At any rate, you're right that a lot of proposals and suggestions here are outdated now that SMALLCAT has been deprecated. I decided to strike a few of them which clearly do not apply anymore, but I won't remove them yet. MFN will probably eventually develop quite independently from SMALLCAT, and will have to be cautious not to repeat its precedessor's mistakes. So the reuse of old texts and clauses should be done with extreme caution, noting that almost every word or phrase in the former SMALLCAT guideline was problematic or ambigious in some way or another. Editors need to understand what the guideline even means, it must be workable and applicable in practice, and ultimately serve the easier navigation of Wikipedia pages by our readers through the category system. NLeeuw (talk) 10:15, 26 November 2023 (UTC)
 * I decided to collapse the outdated proposals instead of striking them; that way they can still be read, but don't take up as much space. Still a lot of the background is analysing the problems of SMALLCAT, but those are often still relevant to preventing a repetition of issues caused by SMALLCAT during the ongoing development of MFN, so I won't be collapsing those yet. NLeeuw (talk) 10:32, 26 November 2023 (UTC)
 * I think we should have the discussion on the talk page rather than the main page. Otherwise the edit history/editing conflicts could be really challenging to manage. Mason (talk) 20:03, 26 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Fair enough; moving. House Blaster talk 20:05, 26 November 2023 (UTC)

Moved and pinged Mason (talk) 20:06, 26 November 2023 (UTC)

"Purpose"
I have to say that "Purpose of categories: easy navigation between pages" is rather dubious at best. One could say that is purpose, but the much more common purpose, on the reader side, is finding generally-related topics. It's not really navigation, but subject-area browsing. Meanwhile, the more common editor-facing purpose is as an organizational system for maintenance purposes. E.g., if I need to make sure all the pages within a wikiproject's scope have project banners on their talk page, the main way to do this is by way of the topic's overarching category. Even if we wanted to claim taht "easy navigation between pages" was a purpose, the other purposes should be explained (and there may be more that I'm nothing thinking of at dark:30). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  13:10, 29 December 2023 (UTC)


 * Is there evidence that readers use categories? I read someone saying that they don’t. SmokeyJoe (talk) 06:02, 21 May 2024 (UTC)

For now
I think “for now” reads as a noncommittal idea. Can it be changed into something objective? SmokeyJoe (talk) 06:13, 21 May 2024 (UTC)