On 8/14/07, Magnus Manske magnusmanske@googlemail.com wrote: [snip]
So, here is my suggestion of the day:
- users can assign tags (single words or phrases) to an image
- users can create implications of tags
- implications are fulfilled by the software automatically
Example: I add the tag "MIG-29" to an image. Someone has said (or will say) that "MIG-29" implies "military aircraft", "russian aircraft", "supersonic aircraft". These, in turn, imply "aircraft" (each of them). All these tags will be added to the tag list of this image automatically (not in real time, but through an updating process in the background). Likewise, if I add an implication to a tag, all images carrying this tag will be updated automatically.
[snip]
Your suggestion is simmlar to what I've been advocating for a while. Perhaps your particular version will gain the traction mine have failed to gain.
Perhaps instead of 'implications' being hard hard assignment they were used in a way users can reject 'implications' which don't apply. This could be accomplished through a kind of negative entry like [[-Category:foo]]. Obviously the correct this to do would be to only use implications in the right places, but there are always exceptions... it would be a shame to introduce something which couldn't handle them.
It seems your suggestion includes the concept of creating a new kind of thing, while I've previously proposed that we just repurpose categories for this application.
I don't much care if the solution uses categories, or some new syntax and foolinks table. ... it's just that categories are readily available for this purpose. Really it's all the same to me.
The only compelling reason I can see to use something other than categories for this is that we don't currently have real category redirects, which would be useful to allow a single unique tag to have representations in multiple languages. If providing yet another syntax is what it takes to get adoption then I'm all for it.
I have an existing local tool which recommends categories based on the parent categories on the image as well as the categories which are on images which are also in the existing categories or on gallery pages common to the image it is suggesting for. It would be pretty easy to convert that into a webapp, possibly even an ajax popup that inserts the new selections directly into the site.