On 18 Jun 2014, at 06:14, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Lars Aronsson wrote:
Why is it still, now in 2014, so hard to find images? We have categories and descriptions, but we also know they don't describe all that we want to find in an image. If I need an image with a bicycle and some red flowers, I can only go to the category:bicycles and hope that I'm lucky when browsing through the first 700 images there. Most likely, the category will be subdivided by country or in some other useless way that will make my search harder.
Where is science? Google was created in 1998, based on its Pagerank algorithm for web pages filled with words and links. That was 14 years ago. But what algorithms are there for finding images?
Hi.
Have you tried Special:Search? :-)
There's a very nice category of red flowers: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Red_flowers.
If you search for 'incategory:"Red flowers"', you can find pictures in only that category. If you search for 'incategory:"Red flowers" incategory:"Bicycles"', you can see the intersection of these two categories. (No results currently, alas.) Try a search such as 'incategory:"Red flowers" incategory:"Cosmos atrosanguineus"' to see the search actually work (it should return one result currently, 'File:Cosmos atrosanguineus "Choco Mocha".jpg').
Hope that helps.
While having category intersection is definitely a huge plus now, for it to work really well we need it to be traversing up and down. Does it do that right now?
Especially because Commons has a policy against over categorisation (which makes sense), and because we subcategorise so insanely much (might not so much sense always but oh well), you really need it to traverse categories recursively to get anything useful.
So that you can search for category "Flowers" or "Red" and still those from "Red flowers".
And similarly so with Bicycles categorised. You want to get those from "Bicycles facing left" or "Bicycles in Vietnam" to be included when looking for "Bicycles".
-- Krinkle