Wondering exactly the same thing - my frustrations with categories began about three years ago and it seems I am surprised monthly by severe limitations to this outdated apparatus. I am a heavy category user, but I would love to be able to kick it out the door in favour of a more structured method. As far as I can tell, there is very little synchronisation among language Wikipedias of category trees, and being able to apply a central structure to all Wikipedias through Wikidata sounds like a great idea, and one which would not disturb the current category trees we already have, but supplement them. As I see it, some category structures are OK, but when categories get big, people split them in non-standard ways, causing problems like this recent media-hype regarding female novellists. I think that it's great this is in the news in this way, because I am sure that most Wikipedia readers never knew we had categories, and this is a great introduction to them, as well as an invitation to edit Wikipedia.
2013/5/4, Chris Maloney voldrani@gmail.com:
I am just curious if there has ever been discussion about the potential for reimplementing / replacing the category system in Wikipedia with semantic tagging in WikiData. It seem to me that the recent kerfuffle with regards to "American women writers" would not have happened if the pages were tagged with simple RDF assertions instead of these convoluted categories. I know, of course, that it would be a huge undertaking, but I just don't see how the category system can continue to scale (I'm amazed it has scaled as well as it has already, of course).
I am trying to learn more about wikidata, and have perused the various infos and FAQs for the last two hours, and can't find any discussion of this particular issue.
-- Chris
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