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

[David Gerard]

2009/8/9 Bod Notbod <bodnotbod at gmail.com>:
> On Sun, Aug 9, 2009 at 12:47 PM, David Gerard<dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

>> 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.

> So would tags replace categories or work alongside?


Ideally, they'd work much as cats do now, but you could easily run
Boolean queries on them without MediaWiki falling over.

The application for Commons is obvious - minute sub-sub-cats are not
nearly as useful for an image database as tags. But the same thing
could be applied to a text encyclopedia quite productively.

Another useful aspect for Commons would be one tag having multiple
names - which solves the present problem that most things on Commons
are categorised in English, which is completely inadequate for an
image repository for projects in any language, and particulary for
ones like es:wp which store *all* their images on Commons. For a text
encyclopedia that could resolve some arguments about what to call a
category, or at least provide a working equivalent of category
redirects.

(I just looked through Bugzilla and "tag" appears to mean something
else in internal MediaWiki jargon. But that's basically the idea.
Extensive wishing about this in the commons-l and wikitech-l archives.
No-one has a deployment-ready version of the feature yet - the closest
anyone's come is using Lucene as the back end, which basically
requires a server all to itself - so the whole thing's currently
wishful vapour and probably awaiting a genius with MySQL tweaking to
write it.)


- d.