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(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote:
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there are artificial constraints with categories that are no longer valid..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(a)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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