I’ve been on this site for so long, doing various tasks, helping on various scripts - including helping out with Categories. I’ve stuck myself into learning about an issue and never really having a chance to report it - at least not publicly through the forums, that is. In one of the introductory games of the 2020 (virtual) meetups, we discussed why categories tend to get changed or don’t display right. We mentioned how it’s caused by Grammarly, a grammar-fixing extension.
However, I have reason to believe with some reasonable evidence, that Grammarly is no longer a viable reason to explain the evidence of a space in between the Category-namespace in the title and the actual category being “fixed”. If you type in any category into the search box of wikiHow, you’ll see how when they come up in the search, not only is there a space, but it actually shows Categories as having two spaces in between the namespace and the category. Although the Category-namespace doesn’t display when you actually the category from the search results (a good move by wikiHow), this can be interesting to conserve kepresses - and something I hate to do thanks to a change since May 2019 when you could no longer copy-and-paste right from the search results of text from this page.
While this doesn’t affect anything other than scripts when the user inputs the wrong category format onto an article, this can be very awkward and cause backlogs on the script page, since very few users actually go in and fix this, and with other issues preventing users from seeing what articles are in a broken category once the MediaWiki “fix” was done earlier this year, it’s been broken and not something very many users will fix quickly.
Grammarly has no longer been asking me to fix the correct format of “broken” categories due to the colon and the next word in English having a space in between, I guess it’s a learning system that unbreaks itself from a tactic after enough “Ignores” in a period of time.
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JayneG
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Although I can see that there is a disconnect between putting in a category manually, and how it displays on the search results, I’m not sure this is something that’s likely to change. The wikitext needs to not have the space in order to function correctly, but if we didn’t put a space in the search results for our readers, that would likely look incorrect.
The majority of people add categories by using the categorizer, and then R2_d2000 helped create an abuse filter that stops people from adding a space when using tools such as Grammarly that may (or maybe now won’t?!) suggest they add a space after the colon. Either way, I’m hopeful that we have a solution in place for now.
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