On 22/02/2008, Samuel Wantman wantman@earthlink.net wrote:
While designing tables for categories, I hope that some thought be given into implementing category intersection. I suspect the process would be much faster with properly designed tables.
OH GOD YES PLEASE say all of us on Commons. We want categories usable more like tags - where you could attach tens of broad tags, and subcategories would form from queries on intersections of them.
This would also solve a lot of problems with ridiculously specific sub-sub-sub-categories on en:wp.
Note that if you build it they will come, i.e. you will get the most ridiculously contorted tag queries being run on a regular basis. Hopefully it won't make the database crap itself if just OR and AND are allowed. Or even just AND.
Previous efforts in this direction have worked well in testing on Postgres, but foundered on MySQL not being up to the task. Since the chance of Wikimedia moving off MySQL is about zero, a solution that works on MySQL would be *wonderful*.
- d.