MZMcBride - Categories are hierarchical and people worry about them overlapping. Tags have no hierarchy.
The major problem is that labor is wasted because there is no easy way to search intersections of categories. Instead of having a category for 18th century French painters, it would be ideal to just have tags for "people in the 18th century" "French people" and "painters" and let the users remix those tags instead of being forced to look in only that branch.
A proposal is at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Beyond_categories
The problem has two parts - WMF cannot coordinate this kind of search with existing categories, and there is no need to reform categories unless there is a commitment to make this search capacity.
I see this as a serious problem.
On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 9:57 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.comwrote:
Hoi, Easy and obvious when you look at it with eyes that do not expect English. A tag will be linked to Wikidata. Consequently it will show differently depending on the language you have selected for yourself.
It is just these other people who will be serviced. Another reason is that there are artificial constraints with categories that are no longer valid.. Who cares that we have more than one million items in a category for instance? Having tags with over one million items is for instance "human". Thanks, GerardM
On 20 May 2014 03:16, 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
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