Please understand that I'm not trying to be argumentative - I'm just trying to understand the value of your idea versus the 'cost'.
BruceS:I am not looking at this really serving the current waymarking community as much as broadening the waymarking community in other ways.
Even if a special categories feature isn't intended to serve the current waymarking community, as long as the underlying purpose of your proposed enhancement is to get new people involved in waymarking, then it is an idea worth considering. I'd like to see your idea included on a list of
ideas of what can be done to get new people involved in waymarking, along with other ideas that could serve the same purpose.
Then we could discuss and compare the ideas, and choose a few that seemed like they would have the biggest potential benefit versus the cost and risk.
My guess is that such a list would contain a few ideas that would both serve the current waymarking community
and draw in new participants.
But at the moment, I just don't see a large enough benefit to your proposal to justify the effort and the risk.
BruceS: Some of the searching stipulations I have listed are ways to avoid confusion. For the normal waymarking community these categories and waymarks would not be seen unless desired thus they would be almost like they were on your ignore list but they would be available to those that have the specific interest in them.
I understand how keeping the special interest categories hidden might help avoid
some confusion. What it less clear to me is what other confusion might be introduced by categories which have no peer review, one officer, and might ultimately consist of waymarks that could fit entirely within another category.
And I think that would might end up happening is that this special type of category (that doesn't require the involvement of other officers, and doesn't have to go through peer review) will be the first and most desirable avenue tried for creating most new categories (even if the traditional category style would be more important, and even if approved, the new category would be invisible). After all, getting a regular category started is such a daunting task, and getting a special category started sounds so easy. The consequences of creating a new avenue for category creation (even if Groundspeak doesn't approve them all) could add great deal of confusion to the current category creation process, and could impact the creative process in ways that were never intended.