On 2/27/07, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 27/02/07, Gregory Maxwell
<gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote:
If we ever want it to be as easy to find images
on commons as it is on
commercial stock photography sites like Getty, we need to stop
pretending that all categories are best used as tools for manual
browsing.
If categories in MediaWiki can be turned into tags, and you can then
do interesting tag queries (and you can be sure the system will be
tested to its limit the moment it's possible), then quite a lot of the
problems with categories on Commons go away without breaking the
current category system on other wikis. Are the efforts to this end
progressing at all?
You can do them right now with Mayflower. This is no accident. :) ..
Mayflower supports giving you an intersection and then subtracting
other categories from that intersection. More complex operations are
easily possible, but I think that what we have is the most useful
starting point.
For our purposes I don't see that using mayflower to get started on
this is bad... it's easier and less risky to do development outside of
MediaWiki proper, and Mayflower is free software running on our
hardware, and written by a community member. So it's not like relying
on Google.
The next step will be to raise awareness. Once more people know about
this there will be less opposition to using categories as tags.