On 2013-05-09 3:21 PM, "Luke Welling WMF" lwelling@wikimedia.org wrote:
Without deliberately making it an even longer term plan, as I think it is
a
great idea, another long goal solution to the same problem would be (as Flow gets Wikipedians into the idea of tagging) that categories get
largely
replaced by tags. That way they lose much of their absoluteness and therefore some of their controversy.
Categories are hard for Wikipedia because compromise is not possible. Consensus can be reached on a subtly different compromise version of the wording of a sentence or paragraph, but there is no compromise on categories. A category either exists or does not. A page either goes in
or
does not.
With tags, a biography could relatively uncontroversially be tagged as "Novelist, Woman, Best Selling, American, Blonde Haired, Enjoys Spicy
Food"
even if nearly everybody agrees that half the tags while true are entirely unimportant and not relevant to the subject's area of notability. Whether some tags like race and appearance should exist at all may still generate debate, but if they are only ever available modifiers and not hard categories their offense would be softened.
For some subjects, entirely uncontroversial tags could be extracted from Wikidata.
It would be content shakeup and therefore perhaps politically difficult, but it would take a lot of the technical challenge out of joins, even permitting joins (automatically or manually) with tags translated into equivalent versions in other languages.
All possible combinations of tag derived categories would then "exist",
and
it would just be a matter of debate as to whether there is a justification to add a link from a page to "Biography+Novelist+Enjoys Spicy Food" or if that is a meaningless category. If reverted, the one person interested in that exact category could still always visit it, it's just that other
users
would not be directed to it unless they probe talk page debates.
Luke Welling
Nobody has ever been able to explain to me the technical difference between tag and category. (Other than being able to query intersections, which is wanted for cats anyhow)
Just change mediawiki:pagecategories to "tags" and change some social conventions - boom you have tags.
-bawolff