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

[Carcharoth]

On Sun, Aug 9, 2009 at 12:47 PM, David Gerard<dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

So all the biographies of women could be tagged "woman"? That would
work, but only if the "woman" tag wasn't applied to other things as
well. Maybe you would have to have "woman" + "biography"? Even then,
it might not be exact. And then you would have "adult", "boy", "girl",
"child", "male", "female".

Tags and categories are different. Ideally, you would have both, or a
clear of idea of what would be "primary" tags (what we call
categories) and what are descriptive tags.

Carcharoth