Talk:Subordinate Legislation (Confirmation and Validation) Act 2015 (Version 22)

Categories

@ElDubs Sorry that removing Category:Subordinate Legislation (Confirmation and Validation) Act 2015 and its subcategories à la Category:Subordinate Legislation (Confirmation and Validation) Act 2015/Section 13 broke something. I didn't expect it to be an issue, especially since the categories don't exist. Can I ask what they're being used for? —CalendulaAsteraceae (talk • contribs) 04:42, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

Not a problem at all! You may already be aware that legislative Acts get updates, and when they do, new versions are published, which is why I have:

• Subordinate Legislation (Confirmation and Validation) Act 2015
• Subordinate Legislation (Confirmation and Validation) Act 2015 (Version 22)
• Subordinate Legislation (Confirmation and Validation) Act 2015 (Version 26)

Outdated versions of Acts are very historically relevant, so it wouldn't be appropriate to just update the Act and remove amended legislation, which is why just as with the official publications, each amendment results in the publication of a new version. Therefore, the main page was turned into a bit of a portal to reach the other versions.

So if you go to the first link above, then you'll see links to the versions, and if you click in any section of that page, such as Section 1, then you'll see it's just a page of links to the versions of that section. These lists of links are auto-generated, and the category is the mechanism that makes it work. It searches for any page with a category that matches the name of the subpage itself, and lists them. So Subordinate Legislation (Confirmation and Validation) Act 2015/Section 13 lists all pages with Category:Subordinate Legislation (Confirmation and Validation) Act 2015/Section 13. The category pages themselves don't actually have to exist for this mechanism to function, and I didn't see a need to clutter the wiki by creating them.

All in all, this functionality ensures that if a Version 27 were created of this act, it could be added int he same ways as 22 and 26, and it would automatically be listed with the rest, ensuring that we keep track of ever evolving legislation.

It's true that this particular example is only two versions and now that it's repealed will never be amended again, but I needed a relatively small legislation to test the functionality with. When applied to larger and more "fluid" acts, I think this system will be far more effective. I think ideally, the "home page" of a legislative Act should be a portal to access all versions of that Act.

My user page also has a bit of information on these DynamicPageLists and how I've gotten to this point.ElDubs (talk) 21:23, 31 January 2023 (UTC)