Recently a lot of people have been talking about what's possible and
what's necessary regarding MediaWiki, CatScan-like tools, and real
category intersection; this mail has some pointers.
The long-term solution is a sparkly query for, e.g., people with aspects
novelist + Singaporean, and it would be great if Wikidata could be the
data-source. Generally people don't really want to search using
hierarchical categories; they want tags and they want AND. But
MediaWiki's current power users do use hierarchical labels, so any
change would have to deal with current users' expectations. Also my
head hurts just thinking of the "but my intuitively obvious ontology is
better than yours" arguments.
Conversations have been a bit scattered:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Beyond_categories
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikidata-l/2013-May/thread.html#2202 ("Question
about wikipedia categories.")
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Category_intersection#A_workin…
CatScan, which can find articles in category intersections:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:CatScan
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/gendergap/2013-April/003552.html
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5244 "Allow searching in
intersections, etc. of categories"
I think the best place to pursue this topic is probably in
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Beyond_categories . It's unlikely
Wikimedia Foundation will be able to make engineers available to work on
this anytime soon, but I would not be surprised if the Wikidata
developer community or volunteers found this interesting enough to work on.
--
Sumana Harihareswara
Engineering Community Manager
Wikimedia Foundation