----- Original Message ----- From: Ben Yates ben.louis.yates@gmail.com
Tags are user-generated categories, sort of. You can tag the "Oak" artlcle with "tree" and "wood" in a little text box somewhere on the page, and if the "wood" tag doesn't already exist, it'll be created on the fly. Tags aren't as strict as categories (you can make spelling errors, for example, or taxonomic ones), which makes them good for wikipedia.
So if I tell Wikipedia to show me all the articles about wood, would it also show me the "tree" articles that an editor forgot to also explicitly add the "wood" tag too? If I tag an article "treee" there won't be a redlink to warn me I've accidentally created an orphan tag? Would an article about a school need to be tagged with city, county, state, country and continent tags independantly, and will all of these tags be displayed in a big lump on the article's page?
I really like the way categories currently work, and I suspect that to get them into this state project-wide it would take more than just a handful of obsessive loons. What I think would be a great addition to categories would be a way to specify explicitly whether a subcategory is meant to be a collection of the same things as fit in the supercategory or if it's just related in a more generic way (eg, [[cat:cities in California]] is a collection of things that also belong in [[cat:cities in the United States]], but the things in [[cat:San Francisco]] do not themselves belong in [[cat:cities in California]]). If this were possible on a software level then an auto-aggregating function would be much less likely to get confused.