Hi,
I hope this is the right place to ask this, but basically I was wondering if I could get a developer's opinion on whether it would be possible to have the category system work more like the tagging systems used by del.icio.us or flickr. There's a bit of a discussion at the village pump, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia%3AVillage_pump_%28techni... which might better explain the concept, but the idea is to bypass a lot of the problems the current system causes with regards to categorisation by gender, ethnicity, nationality, faith and sexual orientation. Any thoughts?
Steve Block
Steve Block wrote:
I hope this is the right place to ask this, but basically I was wondering if I could get a developer's opinion on whether it would be possible to have the category system work more like the tagging systems used by del.icio.us or flickr.
Our categories are tags, just like those. If you want to propose something new about how they're _used_, you might want to be more specific. :)
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
I've put some stub notes about related possibilities at:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Del.icio.us-style_Tags_for_MediaWiki
- Gordon
Steve Block wrote:
Hi,
I hope this is the right place to ask this, but basically I was wondering if I could get a developer's opinion on whether it would be possible to have the category system work more like the tagging systems used by del.icio.us or flickr. There's a bit of a discussion at the village pump, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia%3AVillage_pump_%28techni... which might better explain the concept, but the idea is to bypass a lot of the problems the current system causes with regards to categorisation by gender, ethnicity, nationality, faith and sexual orientation. Any thoughts?
Steve Block
Steve Block wrote:
Hi,
I hope this is the right place to ask this, but basically I was wondering if I could get a developer's opinion on whether it would be possible to have the category system work more like the tagging systems used by del.icio.us or flickr. There's a bit of a discussion at the village pump, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia%3AVillage_pump_%28techni... which might better explain the concept, but the idea is to bypass a lot of the problems the current system causes with regards to categorisation by gender, ethnicity, nationality, faith and sexual orientation. Any thoughts?
Steve Block
Hoi, Yes, it could but I do not like the way Flickr works.. and that one is as good as the del.icio.us stuff.. Yeah, I know. Have a read at the proposal that has already been put forward, http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Using_Ultimate_Wiktionary_for_Commons this is something that can be done in the not too distant future.
The reason why I do not like the Flickr stuff is because I cannot find a سَگ in it. With the functionality we propose you can. While you are at it have a read at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Multilingual_MediaWiki because this will also have an application for Commons. We hope to start the coding on this soon.
Thanks, GerardM
On Fri, Jan 20, 2006 at 12:20:00AM +0100, Gerard Meijssen wrote:
I hope this is the right place to ask this, but basically I was wondering if I could get a developer's opinion on whether it would be possible to have the category system work more like the tagging systems used by del.icio.us or flickr. There's a bit of a discussion at the village pump, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia%3AVillage_pump_%28techni...
Brion is right that categories can be used just like common tags. Not personal tags, thats not what a collaborative wiki is focussed on, perhaps in the future you can tag your Wikipedia views (and then share that view with others, hehe).
Tags, categories, labels (whatever one calls them) can be used in multi-word settings, some Tagging sites just used to have a one-word-per-tag limitation.
which might better explain the concept, but the idea is to bypass a lot of the problems the current system causes with regards to categorisation by gender, ethnicity, nationality, faith and sexual orientation. Any thoughts?
Indeed, the current Wikipedia usage for categories is to put a lot of semantics into one category label. Eg. compare:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Airlines_of_Spain http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Spain
with: http://wikicompany.org/wiki/Category:Airline
Wikicompany tries to keep category labels 1-dimensional (which can still be multi-word), so they can be used (and re-used!) as tags and more (see below). There are some tricky things about doing this, but those are not unsolvable.
Also, the semantics of "Spain" on Wikicompany is different than on Wikipedia. The use on Wikicompany refers specifically to the "service region" of a company (not the company's base).
The real power of _shared_ (not private) tags is not gotton from their current use on websites, since quantity, ambiquity and filtering become issues then.
Eg, a tag for Spain on Flickr can have so many different meanings, that the tag becomes much weaker tool for finding what you want. Now, there are some tag clustering workarounds for this, but thats just what these are IMO.
Whats really needed in combination with tags are semantic annotations. The Semantic MediaWiki project is working on this (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki)
See my email to the SMW mailinglist about my progress on the RDF query system for SMW: https://lists.wikicompany.org/pipermail/wikicompany-list/2006-January/000015...
At the bottom the email also describes some issues relating to the Categories-as-Tags topic.
Please join the SMW list to help discuss these issues further.
Yes, it could but I do not like the way Flickr works.. and that one is as good as the del.icio.us stuff.. Yeah, I know. Have a read at the proposal that has already been put forward, http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Using_Ultimate_Wiktionary_for_Commons this is something that can be done in the not too distant future.
They demo is nice, but what I see seems to be a limited form of a graph-based semanticweb annotation system. Perhaps the proposal is just whats needed for the new Wiktionary, but I'm not sure this couldn't be done better using SMW software meta-information models.
Is there actually any cooperation between these two projects?
The reason why I do not like the Flickr stuff is because I cannot find a ?????? in it. With the functionality we propose you can. While you are at it have a read at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Multilingual_MediaWiki because this will also have an application for Commons. We hope to start the coding on this soon.
I agree with this, but the solution isn't to not use tags/labels/categories. The real solution lies in a combination of various meta-info systems and a powerful browse/search interface. For a project like Wikipedia a very flexible solution is needed.
regards,
Jama Poulsen http://wikicompany.org http://debianlinux.net
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org