On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 9:16 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
I'll be leaving Commons categorisation until it's tags rather than ridiculously specific subcategories.
Commons has tags right now: they're called categories. Or is there a distinction you're making? :-)
Tim and I discussed this a few weeks ago and I was mostly on your side, but when he asked what would be different, I had difficulty articulating a great response. It seems to really come down to a social problem on Commons. Some Commoners seem to have very specific views of what categories should be for and how they should be constructed and named. But this isn't a technical problem, per se. Poor labeling or other interface design problems (or outright limitations) in MediaWiki may contribute to this problem, but is there a larger technical issue here? It seems to primarily be a social issue, from what I've seen, not a technical issue. I'd be interested in your thoughts on this.
There are specific features we'd like to have (such as built-in intersections), but is there a fundamental difference between categories and tags? Or perhaps put another way: what are we waiting for, exactly?
MZMcBride
Sure - ease of use for tagging and the sometimes complex hierarchical nature of categories. Tagging is also common web technology that a large proportion of users should be familiar with. At the moment, I suspect almost all new users to Wikimedia projects find categories difficult to navigate and to apply. There are many other differences off the top of my head, which I'm sure you grasp better than I do, so is there a deeper meaning to your question that I'm missing?