On 10/04/07, John Lee johnleemk@gmail.com wrote:
On 4/10/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Also, tags should come secondary to a better process for handling categories - I think it'd be far more invaluable to support unions and intersections of categories rather than
to
simply have tags for articles.
As I understand it, the plan is that categories here will work much like tags do elsewhere. Such that whether you call it a "category" or a "tag" is irrelevant.
Categorisation on Wikipedia will remain an editorial decision, with considerations of NPOV, verifiability and so forth. (And I've just had the idea of references for categories pop into my head. Euwww.)
Maybe it's just me, but like Andrew, I find the tags system to be not very structured and on occasion, confusing. I still think working with the existing category system would be a better idea - not to mention that it'd probably be more technically feasible.
The lack of structure in these kinds of folksonomies would make Wikipedia quite useless to anyone who isn't casually browsing. The more prescriptive and pre-determined the organisational system is, the more useful Wikipedia becomes to those who want to use it for research.
Ideally, articles themselves will eventually include structured, semantic data which would make the need for highly structured categorisation far less important.