On 2013-05-09 3:21 PM, "Luke Welling WMF" <[email protected]> wrote: > > Without deliberately making it an even longer term plan, as I think it is a > great idea, another long goal solution to the same problem would be (as > Flow gets Wikipedians into the idea of tagging) that categories get largely > replaced by tags. That way they lose much of their absoluteness and > therefore some of their controversy. > > Categories are hard for Wikipedia because compromise is not possible. > Consensus can be reached on a subtly different compromise version of the > wording of a sentence or paragraph, but there is no compromise on > categories. A category either exists or does not. A page either goes in or > does not. > > With tags, a biography could relatively uncontroversially be tagged as > "Novelist, Woman, Best Selling, American, Blonde Haired, Enjoys Spicy Food" > even if nearly everybody agrees that half the tags while true are entirely > unimportant and not relevant to the subject's area of notability. Whether > some tags like race and appearance should exist at all may still generate > debate, but if they are only ever available modifiers and not hard > categories their offense would be softened. > > For some subjects, entirely uncontroversial tags could be extracted from > Wikidata. > > It would be content shakeup and therefore perhaps politically difficult, > but it would take a lot of the technical challenge out of joins, even > permitting joins (automatically or manually) with tags translated into > equivalent versions in other languages. > > All possible combinations of tag derived categories would then "exist", and > it would just be a matter of debate as to whether there is a justification > to add a link from a page to "Biography+Novelist+Enjoys Spicy Food" or if > that is a meaningless category. If reverted, the one person interested in > that exact category could still always visit it, it's just that other users > would not be directed to it unless they probe talk page debates. > > Luke Welling > >
Nobody has ever been able to explain to me the technical difference between tag and category. (Other than being able to query intersections, which is wanted for cats anyhow) Just change mediawiki:pagecategories to "tags" and change some social conventions - boom you have tags. -bawolff _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
