2009/3/31 Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com:
On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 5:57 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
(In image search, Google and all other search engines still suck. Here's to tagging coming to Commons.)
Isn't that because people don't label, keyword or otherwise tag images properly? If they did, then Google would be able to find them and provide a good search facility. It might also be because lots of images are locked up in websites that only allow internal searches (though some are Google-able).
General images on websites are only "tagged" by the file name and the surrounding text. Maybe the alt= text if they ever bother putting that on the page.
Google's key 1998 innovation was noticing that good pages tend to be the ones linked to on a subject. This put them so far ahead of all other search engines they took over search. Without advertising themselves.
With Commons, we're wanting a boolean category filter, to turn categories into tags that can be combined for queries. This solves the problem of minute subcategories like [[Category:Left-handed dead Jewish lesbian Presidents with argyria]] - all those attributes can be a category instead, and the minute subcategory a query.
Data on Wikipedia will tend to become more machine-readable. Templates are mostly a good idea.
The worry there is that overuse of templates raises the barrier for humans to contribute.
The plumbing of templates is horrible, but the actual template interface is simple. Presumably WYSIWYG editing tools can be tweaked to make it a fill-in form more accessibly.
- d.