On 4/10/07, David Gerard <dgerard(a)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.
--
Oldak Quill (oldakquill(a)gmail.com)