On 2/27/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 27/02/07, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
If we ever want it to be as easy to find images on commons as it is on commercial stock photography sites like Getty, we need to stop pretending that all categories are best used as tools for manual browsing.
If categories in MediaWiki can be turned into tags, and you can then do interesting tag queries (and you can be sure the system will be tested to its limit the moment it's possible), then quite a lot of the problems with categories on Commons go away without breaking the current category system on other wikis. Are the efforts to this end progressing at all?
You can do them right now with Mayflower. This is no accident. :) .. Mayflower supports giving you an intersection and then subtracting other categories from that intersection. More complex operations are easily possible, but I think that what we have is the most useful starting point.
For our purposes I don't see that using mayflower to get started on this is bad... it's easier and less risky to do development outside of MediaWiki proper, and Mayflower is free software running on our hardware, and written by a community member. So it's not like relying on Google.
The next step will be to raise awareness. Once more people know about this there will be less opposition to using categories as tags.