Warn user when they select "bad" category

mnalis commented 3 months ago

What is the user problem or growth opportunity you want to see solved?

As mentioned in https://github.com/commons-app/apps-android-commons/issues/3179#issuecomment-2145839062, it would be good if user, upon selecting a Category for their image, would be warned (or even situation automatically fixed!) if that category is discouraged, specifically:

if the category has been moved/renamed (e.g. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Archeology_in_Serbia). If so, we should select that destination category instead automatically.
we might also check if category has zero members (or maybe even zero files -- e.g. if it has only subcategories), and warn the user if that is the case so they might go back and choose other category if they want. E.g. ship hull categories like https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:IMO_8022975 are intended to only have subcategories of actual ships where pictures of ships should go (like e.g. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Olea_(ship,_1981))
if the category is marked as hidden, we should warn the user and allow them to select different category. (e.g. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:PD_NASA)

That would reduce issues with users selecting misspelled or otherwise discouraged categories

How do you know that this problem exists today? Why is this important?

User is shown all categories that were ever created, even if they were misspelled or otherwise abandoned. They are also shown categories which are only intended as "placeholders", i.e. as a parent category for related actual categories containing user files.

Who will benefit from it?

Everybody who uses Commons categories to search for content would benefit from from such improved categorization.

Anything else you would like to add?

No response

nicolas-raoul commented 3 months ago

If detecting these is not too costly in terms of time, the best would be to not even suggest these categories.

mnalis commented 3 months ago

If detecting these is not too costly in terms of time, the best would be to not even suggest these categories.

In some cases (like hidden categories for example) I agree -- if possible and fast, it would be ideal to skip even suggesting them. But if it requires sending separate API request for each category (as I suspect might in some cases), then it would be prohibitive, obviously (e.g. for list of first 25 categories retrieved by 1 API call; we might need 25 extra API request)

For some other cases (e.g. zero media in it), we should still offer the category. Because, if I've just created category so I can put media in it, I would definitely like if that category was offered to me (and just warned that it is empty, and if I wanted to proceed). Otherwise, I'd never be able to use any new categories in the app...

So simplest is probably as described in the issue initially for all cases: just warn the user when they select the category, but allow them to proceed if they want (as it does just one small API call, and more importantly it does not introduce new usability issues).

commons-app / apps-android-commons