On 10/04/07, John Lee johnleemk@gmail.com wrote:
At the same time, though I don't like the tag system that's become almost omnipresent in blogs (mainly for the same reasons Andrew has articulated), I don't see why it shouldn't be ruled out. It'd be nice to have, and I don't see how it could hurt - although obviously since, as David notes, it'll place a huge strain on our servers, it shouldn't be implemented until we have the technical horsepower to handle it.
Technical note: it appears to work much more nicely in PostgreSQL than MySQL - but the chances of Wikimedia's servers moving off MySQL are about zero.
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.)
- d.