Jane Darnell wrote:
No, tagging is different. GerardM blogged about this
with the example of
"horse". You can "tag" a photo as being of a horse by putting it in
the
horse category, but in no time it will be filed under some subcategory of
horse. There are relatively few images in the top "horse" category.
This is one of the most baffling parts of Commons to me. Why is it a
problem to have images of horses in Category:Horse? You seem to be
describing a social problem ("it will be filed under some subcategory [by
a person]"), not a technical problem. If people are vandalizing files by
removing useful categories, we should tell them to stop immediately.
Moreover, most pictures of horses are not even in the
horse category tree,
but are categorized under some GLAM donation category and have never been
sorted into any other category.
This doesn't make any sense to me either. There's no real limit to the
number of categories that a file can have. Why not have both
Category:Horse and Category:Donated_by_some_institution? What's the
technical issue here?
The concept of categorizing is also based on existing
categories, and the
process of creating categories, though not difficult, is not easily
available to newbies.
It's already fairly simple to add a category to a page (the category
description page doesn't need to exist for a category to have members),
but we need to make it simpler and more fun, as I said.
Tagging allows the user complete freedom in associating
concepts with
images. Ideas around tagging on Commons have been rejected as putting an
extra burden on anti-vandal fighters, in addition to being possibly
useless in the goal of "making search on Commons suck less"
Useless? Tagging is a major part of search. I have no idea what you're
talking about here. My understanding is that GerardM believes that we'll
put tags into Wikidata instead of on Commons. I don't think any reasonable
person seriously questions the utility or virtue of tagging. I think many
reasonable look at the current classification system on Commons and
genuinely do find it completely useless and incredibly frustrating.
MZMcBride