On 23/01/2008, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:

Success is less about the content, and more about *the collection* and the search. Google made its first zillion billion not because it controlled a lot of content but because it helped people find a lot of other people's content.

The search, the search, the search! "We have Wikimedia Commons, with millions of freely-reusable pre-cleared photos. It's like Getty Images with a really crap search."

(No, not even Mayflower has fixed that.)

I think this is an area where commons really has something to offer: Universally editable metadata could make for impressive search power, and free licensing means all images are available for use (sometimes, with copyleft works, at the price of freely releasing your own work).

If turning categories into tags within Mediawiki is unlikely to happen soon (I recall the previous experiment where on Postgres it was lovely and on MySQL it was horribly slow ... and there's zero chance of Wikimedia abandoning MySQL in the foreseeable future) - what about a "tags" template for image pages, which can then be parsed by a search application on the toolserver? Update daily or something. Then an image can have 10 or 100 or 1000 tags, even if that many Mediawiki categories would be problematic to display or process. Sound feasible?

(cc to commons-l and wikitech-l)

- d.