On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 1:34 PM, Stan Shebs <stanshebs(a)earthlink.net> wrote: [...] [...] Unfortunately that seems to be always the case when it comes to categorizing. Few people are interested in categorization at all, and even fewer people seem to be interested in discussing it. It is a major problem for Commons I think, but I don't know whether we can solve it. Bryan

IMO there is no point in discussing it at the present time. I've tried it and failed. We have to make categories useful for commons, and that means turning them into a tagging system (what they technically already are). And that can only be accomplished by getting category intersections to work. That would also mean getting rid of the "most precise category" paradigm. * Who needs a category "Bridges in Swizerland" when you can tag images with "Bridge" and "Switzerland". * Who needs small browsable categories when you can have small browsable intersection results (and galleries for that matter) So when we get the infrastructure we should have the discussion, and create a stringently enforced policy on the issue -- [[en:User:Dschwen]] [[de:Benutzer:Dschwen]] [[commons:User:Dschwen]]

You cannot be serious!?! Yeah, and a Wiki doesn't work in theory either, fortunately it works in practice. Have a little more faith in our users. We don't have any "Holiday" or "Aunt Isabell" categories either. Claiming this will change when we use categories as tags is completely unfounded speculation (or FUD). -- [[en:User:Dschwen]] [[de:Benutzer:Dschwen]] [[commons:User:Dschwen]]

I see what your point is, but there are ways to avoid your horror scenario :-) * Watch categories/tags using the category rss feeds to monitor new additions. * Sort category namespace pages to list new additions first This would make them manageable even if doe to less specific tagging the category pages would fill up with thousands of images. An alternative would be to keep using precise categories, but take all their toplevel categories into account when doing intersections! -- [[en:User:Dschwen]] [[de:Benutzer:Dschwen]] [[commons:User:Dschwen]]

On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 8:28 PM, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher(a)gmail.com> wrote: ... Perpetual catch-22. Finding things using category intersections is totally useless when things have been reduced to a single category, ... and not very useful when the categories applied are "Bridges made of stone in the Ukraine with a rated capacity greater than 200 poot" The idea of 'a category implies its children' isn't possible in high performance solutions because it would make it possible for a single user action to have to touch millions of elements of data. (Cat:C contains all plaints, C is put into A, now the internal references for A have to have all plants added)... while a pure tagging system is either O(1) or O(number of cats on an image) operation per update depending on if the data is forward or inverse indexed. There is no huge technical challenge in making ultrafast intersections. Any full-text indexing system can do it. I put up an example external system built on postgresql some months ago that could intersect/exclude *any* mixture of categories in a few milliseconds I turned it off because no one was using it and one day MSN's web spider decided to enumerate all possible intersections. ;) I don't see why anyone is going to have much interest in building fast intersection systems which will have limited usefulness given how many users believe we should be using categories. ... so if people will only *consider* possibly changing their behavior after the system is fully formed and production ready, we seem to have a stalemate. (Ha, Enwp can keep their inclusionists and deletionists ... At commons we have intersectionalists and classificationists!) .