On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 9:44 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Nathan wrote:
Sure - ease of use for tagging and the sometimes complex hierarchical nature of categories.
For ease of use (adding and removing), I think most wikis have HotCat (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/HotCat). Is that insufficient?
Regarding hierarchy, there's absolutely no technical reason, as far as I'm aware, that categories must be hierarchal. It's certainly an intended feature that categories have subcategories and the capability to be hierarchal (i.e., you can have subcategories), but you can concurrently use categories with a flat structure. Right?
Tagging is also common web technology that a large proportion of users should be familiar with.
It's a common term, sure. It's been suggested that this may simply be a user interface labeling problem, though. If we renamed "Categories" at the bottom of the page to "Tags", what else needs doing?
MZMcBride
I know I'm accustomed to the type of interaction that modern keyword tagging provides. Simple "Add a tag" or just "tag", predictable and easy to understand results when you click on the tag, etc. Right now Hotcat isn't (I don't think?) enabled by default, and even the Hotcat interface is sort of clunky and weird. Then when you click on a category you get lists of subcategories, thumbnails of media, and then a mess of links to pages with no organization whatsoever beyond alphabetization.
So perhaps the technical difference between cats and tags are not that great, but the larger point that tagging is better rests on the substantial implementation and interface differences between typical tagging and MediaWiki cats.