Forum:Limit categorisation to the Main namespace?

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Limit categorisation to the Main namespace?

Is it worth limiting templatised categorisation to pages in the Main namespace? As an example of a problem, see User:Try.else.finally which shows up in several categories. This could be achieved by replacing "[[Category:...]]" with "{{#if:{{NAMESPACE}}||[[Category:...]]}}", perhaps. - Stelio (talk) 17:21, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

Depends a bit on how much people use bare categories. Typically for queries that look at categories we do [[Category:...]] [[:+]] to just exclude other namespaces from the query, which takes care of a lot of the use cases. But probably not all, so it might be worth excluding other namespaces from the categories altogether. The caveat is that sometimes it's a useful debugging trick to do something like that; there are other ways to do it, but it would limit options a bit. Tirerim (talk) 18:06, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

I definitely agree we should keep sandboxes and userpages out of game-related categories and queries, but I'm not sure what the right approach would be. Just off the top of my head:

• Making categories conditional would be difficult to automate. Only certain categories make sense to restrict, but making an exhaustive list is daunting even with regexes. Maybe if we explicitly excluded user and sandbox namespaces?
• Would adding extra conditionals to every major template create performance issues?
• Browsing categories is more accessible to readers than writing their own queries. I don't want to leave messy categories just because we can work around it with SMW.
• This isn't just an issue for categories: game-related properties also wind up in other namespaces. Again, we can exclude those too, but how do we ensure we've remembered to limit the namespace in every template and concept? What about non-editors using the semantic search, who may not know about excluding namespaces?

Whatever way we want to do things, I think it would make sense to start removing old sandboxed templates and reformatting any on userpages. Optimatum (talk) 17:35, 14 May 2024 (UTC)