Wondering exactly the same thing - my frustrations with categories began about three years ago and it seems I am surprised monthly by severe limitations to this outdated apparatus. I am a heavy category user, but I would love to be able to kick it out the door in favour of a more structured method. As far as I can tell, there is very little synchronisation among language Wikipedias of category trees, and being able to apply a central structure to all Wikipedias through Wikidata sounds like a great idea, and one which would not disturb the current category trees we already have, but supplement them. As I see it, some category structures are OK, but when categories get big, people split them in non-standard ways, causing problems like this recent media-hype regarding female novellists. I think that it's great this is in the news in this way, because I am sure that most Wikipedia readers never knew we had categories, and this is a great introduction to them, as well as an invitation to edit Wikipedia.
2013/5/4, Chris Maloney <voldr...@gmail.com>: > I am just curious if there has ever been discussion about the > potential for reimplementing / replacing the category system in > Wikipedia with semantic tagging in WikiData. It seem to me that the > recent kerfuffle with regards to "American women writers" would not > have happened if the pages were tagged with simple RDF assertions > instead of these convoluted categories. I know, of course, that it > would be a huge undertaking, but I just don't see how the category > system can continue to scale (I'm amazed it has scaled as well as it > has already, of course). > > I am trying to learn more about wikidata, and have perused the various > infos and FAQs for the last two hours, and can't find any discussion > of this particular issue. > > -- Chris > > _______________________________________________ > Wikidata-l mailing list > Wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l > _______________________________________________ Wikidata-l mailing list Wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l