Lane Rasberry wrote:
MZMcBride - Categories are hierarchical and people worry about them overlapping. Tags have no hierarchy.
Categories _can be_ hierarchical, but categories can simultaneously be flat. People worry about a lot of things, but that doesn't mean there are substantive issues to be addressed. Sometimes there are just worries. :-)
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.
So why not put the image in "Category:Painters" and "Category:French people" and "Category:People in the 18th century"? I don't think there's any technical reason not to. It would certainly be nice to have built-in category intersections (previously mentioned in this mailing list thread), but for now Commons has external tools, I believe? Why not use categories as tags today?
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.
Thanks for the link!
It lists "Over- and under-categorization" and links to https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Categories which states (in part):
--- The general rule is always place an image in the most specific categories, and not in the levels above those. ---
The rest of "Commons:Categories" is somewhat illuminating... this really does seem to be a social issue with Commons, not a problem in MediaWiki. It's possible there's ongoing miscommunication here: people on Commons are waiting around for tags to magically appear one day, while MediaWiki developers are looking at the current categories system and wondering why Commoners have developed such an oddly rigid categorization scheme.
I'm not sure what you see as a serious problem. Is it just the lack of built-in intersections? We already have the ability to add categories/tags to media. Are intersections the missing piece before it's acceptable to have "Category:Red" to tag every image that contains the color red? Or put "Category:Man" on every picture that contains a picture of a man? Why can't we do this right now?
MZMcBride