2014-12-13 18:37 GMT+01:00 David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:
Pretty much. We use minute sub-sub-sub-categories because Boolean arithmetic on categories used to be unfeasible; now it's feasible, but we don't do it because that's not the convention. So it would require convincing the Commons community that moving to categories as tags is a good idea.
But the categories and tags are two different ways of creating of organizing items. Tagging is flat, categories are hierarchical by defintion. Using categories as a kind of tags makes all the mess... As categories do make sense for encyclopedic articles - for pictures and other media it does not work well... For example - if I want to make a picture of Polish actress searchable - the most natural method is to add tags: "actors", "Polish" an "woman". But in Commons I have to add it to category named "Actresses from Poland". The upload wizzard is not very helpful - as if I start inserting to the category field "Polish" (which seems to be most natural thing) it won't show me categories "Actors from..." Moreover this category is not very helpful for readers and reuses - as they have no option to get list of pictures of all Polish actors as long as they don't know this "from" convention and speak English...
Probably somewhere on Commons there was long discussion of moving "Polish actors" category to "Actors from Poland" (and for all other professions and nationalities) and starting it again might be treated as a kind of trolling, but I really don't know where and when it happened and I really don't care. I just want to know how to properly mark pictures to make them searchable as uploader, and how to find them as reader/reuser. And at the moment Commons from both this POVs is quite obviously dysfunctional. The issue is to let uploaders easy mark pictures to make them to be able to be easily found... Really...
Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.cbmm.lodz.pl/work.php?id=29&title=tomasz-ganicz