Wondering exactly the same thing - my frustrations with categories
began about three years ago and it seems I am surprised monthly by
severe limitations to this outdated apparatus. I am a heavy category
user, but I would love to be able to kick it out the door in favour of
a more structured method. As far as I can tell, there is very little
synchronisation among language Wikipedias of category trees, and being
able to apply a central structure to all Wikipedias through Wikidata
sounds like a great idea, and one which would not disturb the current
category trees we already have, but supplement them. As I see it, some
category structures are OK, but when categories get big, people split
them in non-standard ways, causing problems like this recent
media-hype regarding female novellists. I think that it's great this
is in the news in this way, because I am sure that most Wikipedia
readers never knew we had categories, and this is a great introduction
to them, as well as an invitation to edit Wikipedia.
2013/5/4, Chris Maloney <voldrani(a)gmail.com>om>:
I am just curious if there has ever been discussion
about the
potential for reimplementing / replacing the category system in
Wikipedia with semantic tagging in WikiData. It seem to me that the
recent kerfuffle with regards to "American women writers" would not
have happened if the pages were tagged with simple RDF assertions
instead of these convoluted categories. I know, of course, that it
would be a huge undertaking, but I just don't see how the category
system can continue to scale (I'm amazed it has scaled as well as it
has already, of course).
I am trying to learn more about wikidata, and have perused the various
infos and FAQs for the last two hours, and can't find any discussion
of this particular issue.
-- Chris
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