On Sun, May 5, 2013 at 12:01 PM, Bob Kosovsky <bobkosovsky(a)nypl.org> wrote:
I was thinking exactly the same thing, Lane - that
Wikipedia should get
rid of all the categorization and stick to tags - but then MediaWiki would
need to have some kind of search mechanism for multiple tags.
Maybe it's unfeasible at this time to do anything to Wikipedia, but why
can't we make a concerted effort to realize this on Commons for GLAM
contributions?
If we stick to multiple "single" categories (as opposed to
intersections),
something like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:CatScan
makes it easy to re-create the intersections of any of them on demand
without having to pre-create the intersection cats. That's pretty close to
tagging.
There are already several approaches to searchable-metadata (persondata,
chembox index fields, etc.) that are easily searchable by external engines.
All we need to have is agreed-upon unique tokens for these things. Er, I
guess, "All" we need, and that's a stumbling-block.