To encourage and empower edit reviewing and patrolling based on subjects of interest, the Integrated Filters project includes Category search filtering tools (T163433). The usefulness of this potentially powerful function is significantly reduced, however, by known limitations to the organization of categories: Contrary to behavior of many familiar categorization schemes, wiki categories do not contain the content of their sub-categories. So, paradoxically, the broader the category a user searches on, the fewer page results he's liable to find—because the broadest categories often contain only other categories, and no actual articles.
To get around this limitation, we will explore the feasibility of a search that "crawls" down into at least some few of its immediate sub-categories, to find changes that pertain to the articles they contain. At this point, this task is an engineering research project. Questions to explor include:
- How might this be done?
- How many sub-levels can be crawled before performance is a problem?
- Is there, perhaps, some way to adjust the number of levels crawled based on how populous the categories are?
Once we've explored these and other questions, we'll decide whether a scheme to achieve our goal is practical and useful, and how to represent this unusual functionality to users.