On 10/28/2010 6:11 PM, Neil Kandalgaonkar wrote:
I was just talking about this with some other people
at the WMF... I
don't fully understand the ramifications of the debate, but it seems
obvious to me that categories as implemented are not useful.
The debate I see on Commons and elsewhere focuses on trying to fix
Categories, but frankly IMO it would be better to migrate them to some
other systems entirely.
At any rate, I don't know that they can be fixed
without at least being
forked. Right now, categories are being used to serve two purposes,
tagging and hierarchical organization. By being pulled in two
directions, it's impossible to do either all that well, and sometimes
the tensions have other undesirable consequences. For example,
categorization awkwardness gets in the way of good management of
potentially offensive images.
--Michael Snow