[WikiEN-l] If anyone ever says Wikipedia is too deletionist

[David Gerard]

2009/8/9  <WJhonson at aol.com>:

> About "Women" on Wikipedia, I think "famous" is probably problematic, like
> "list of short women", is too much based on a judgement call.
> And a list of all women on wikipedia would be too enormous.
> However I would think no one would object to something like Women by
> Nationality and then have a sub-cat for each nation.  That you'd just have to all
> up everyone in that cat.


The problem being discussed in this thread would be solved by the
feature (much-desired by Commons) of turning categories into tags - so
that e.g. [[Category:Left-handed dead Jewish lesbian presidents of the
United States]] could become a query combining a pile of tags, rather
than a ridiculously specific sub-sub-category as we have now.

The nice thing is that going from the tiny sub-sub-cats to a query on
tags can be done gradually without a lot of disruption.

At the moment a test version of this feature worked like a dream in
PostgreSQL, but failed miserably in MySQL, 'cos MySQL is shit.
Unfortunately, it's also what Wikimedia runs on. People are working on
workarounds at various rates.


- d.