[Commons-l] Fwd: "Did you know?" ... The family tree of [[Category:Copyright statuses]] and our broken category system.

[Brianna Laugher]

On 30/01/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/30/07, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher at gmail.com> wrote:
> > It works poorly if you expand all the way, and the higher up in the
> > tree you start, the worse it works. In my experience using
> > Duesentrieb's tool, it works quite well when you specify a low depth
> > (depth=1,2,3). Often 1 is appropriate.
>
> *sigh*.
>
> In my example, cutting at depth 3 would prevent you from finding many
> of the copyright tags for example,

There is no universally correct depth, you have to play around and
find what's appropriate for your topic.

> If I fix bug1211 on commons will you withdraw your objection to large
> categories? Changing the code to make two queries probably wouldn't be
> too stab worthy.

Not at least until we see the category intersection tool in action.
Seriously, if broad categories make this tool more useful, there will
be a natural community push to adapt the category system. What is the
need for a pre-emptive push?

Two other improvements I would like to see on categories are (a)
user-specified size to show (instead of 200, offer choices in
special:preferences), or possibly just a 'show all' option on all cats
> 200; and (b) different category sort options, such as date uploaded
(chron/reverse), date added to category (chron/reverse).

Hm, maybe I need to open bug reports for those ideas.

> Frankly, I think it's really offensive that we'll waste are time
> talking about army waving dreams of semantic mediawiki with its
> academic appeal, when we can't even manage to provide the basic
> service our users require.

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that I think Semantic MediaWiki will be
implemented any time during the next 5 years, because I don't. :) I
agree, it's not worth wasting time discussing it at the moment.

And I also agree that we are doing an extraordinarily bad job at
providing basic services such as search. (
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8738 ) I can tell how
much we suck just from using Flickr.

MediaWiki is probably not the best tool for managing a media database,
at least in its current form. (
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3712 )

> With the man power we can put behind marking up our content there is
> no reason we couldn't be just as good in this regard as the commercial
> stock photo houses.

I think you are vastly overstating the potential of a cat intersection
tool if you think simply switching to broad cats instead of narrow
will produce the kind of dazzling results that Getty images does. :P
Getty obviously pays devs to spend a lot of time on this kind of
thing. Ditto Flickr. AFAIK we have no devs who are particularly
interested in improving media search. Of course we are the poor
cousin. It is very frustrating but it seems to me that that is the lot
of the open content volunteer.

It is one thing to mark up our content specially, but we need the
other side of that - a way to query it properly. There is no reason
this only applies to categories. There is all sorts of info metadata
that it would be useful to specifically query, but we have no way to.

 But we're not. Commons stinks in comparison and if
> we continue to put off simple and straight-forward measures which will
> provide the basic features that people need in favor of using commons
> as a science project

?? How about our everyday users?

Confronting them with vast categories of thousands of items doesn't
sound like such a great idea to me. Of course offering them
ridiculously narrow cats is also frustrating. We try to strike a
balance.

Anyway, you didn't answer my other questions. Are you proposing that
for an image of a woman, we should put For a portrait of a woman, we
should put
[[category:women]]
[[category:homo]]
[[category:Hominidae]]
[[category:primates]]
[[category:Mammalia]]
[[Category:Vertebrata]]
[[Category:Chordata]]
[[Category:Animalia]]
[[Category:Eukaryota]]
and all the other cats up the tree? This would be a lot more intensive
for the categoriser who has to find all these categories, instead of
simply finding the most specific one that applies, as they currently
do.

and secondly is the cat intersection tool going to have a "flatten to
a specified depth" option, or not?

cheers,
Brianna