2007/2/14, Eugene Zelenko <eugene.zelenko(a)gmail.com>om>: No, this is another problem, which I have already noted on [[meta:User Talk:Tangotango/Mayflower]]: The tool does not handle non-ascii characters, but instead acts as if they were spaces. -- Andre Engels, andreengels(a)gmail.com ICQ: 6260644 -- Skype: a_engels

On 2/27/07, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: The search would be well equipped to handle this if only we didn't use categories in a rather brain dead manner. In your "Canon camera" search most of the results just have the words "canon" and "camera" in random spots in the description text. The search you want is: http://tools.wikimedia.de/~tangotango/mayflower/search.php?q=Canon&ic=C… But because of the obsession with sub-categorization on commons the endless number of sub-categories means you miss most of the results. :( If we used categories well, you could depend on there being a category "cameras" and a category "canon products" on the pictures you want. Mayflower will gladly search for the intersection of these two taggings. I'm sure someone will suggest having the search walk the category hierarchy, but not only is this computationally expensive, it will result in an incorrect result: [[Category:Photos_taken_with_Canon]] is a child of [[Canon_cameras]], and I wouldn't be surprised to find that some of the "Taken with Canon foo5" are children of "Canon foo5". I don't think that Photos_taken_with_Canon as a child of Canon_cameras is actually an unreasonable situation when you think of the category tree as a structure designed to help humans find categories. ... Nor do I think that using the category tree as an exclusive human aid is a problem since due to their being too many semantic link types, the drift will always make such simple relationships error prone. If we ever want it to be as easy to find images on commons as it is on commercial stock photography sites like Getty, we need to stop pretending that all categories are best used as tools for manual browsing.

On 2/27/07, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: You can do them right now with Mayflower. This is no accident. :) .. Mayflower supports giving you an intersection and then subtracting other categories from that intersection. More complex operations are easily possible, but I think that what we have is the most useful starting point. For our purposes I don't see that using mayflower to get started on this is bad... it's easier and less risky to do development outside of MediaWiki proper, and Mayflower is free software running on our hardware, and written by a community member. So it's not like relying on Google. The next step will be to raise awareness. Once more people know about this there will be less opposition to using categories as tags.

On 2/27/07, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: Probably, but that is being fixed.

On 2/27/07, Florian Straub <flominator(a)gmx.net> wrote: "One word" is a little draconian. For example, achieving "United Nations" by intersecting "United" and "Nations" is probably wrongheaded. Ideally a category will express one idea.. membership in one group, or relationship to a single collection of things. They should not be precomputed intersections of distinct things such as "Images of overweight men smoking cigars who were US presidents". If cats express one idea or group then many will be one word, but not all. :) I also don't think it's wrong to have some categories effectively be precomputed intersections, if they are particularly useful ones or interesting ones... but that shouldn't excuse us from also putting in the more general ones that apply. More data is usually useful.