On Sun, May 5, 2013 at 12:01 PM, Bob Kosovsky <bobkosovsky@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.