18 May, 2010, Runter wrote in the 62nd comment:
David Haley said:
Stack Overflow is a site that's thought about this kind of stuff quite a bit – maybe it wouldn't be such a bad idea to take inspiration from how things work over there.
It wouldn't satisfy people like Tyche, of course, because tags aren't free-form, but it seems to work well enough for categorizing things. (That said, we might want a finer granularity of tags than what they have.)
The point of tags is to make finding useful information easier for people in general. For this to work, obviously the site interface must help (the current alphabetical list has its issues) but also having useless, noisy tags simply reduces the usefulness of appropriate tags – unless those noisy tags can be hidden away. Again, site interface can help, but obviously the community would have a role to play if it came down to voting. It would be entirely possible for the community to 'vote' the feature out of usefulness…
Igabod said:
but this may have problems which I haven't thought of yet.
Stack Overflow is a site that's thought about this kind of stuff quite a bit – maybe it wouldn't be such a bad idea to take inspiration from how things work over there.
It wouldn't satisfy people like Tyche, of course, because tags aren't free-form, but it seems to work well enough for categorizing things. (That said, we might want a finer granularity of tags than what they have.)
The point of tags is to make finding useful information easier for people in general. For this to work, obviously the site interface must help (the current alphabetical list has its issues) but also having useless, noisy tags simply reduces the usefulness of appropriate tags – unless those noisy tags can be hidden away. Again, site interface can help, but obviously the community would have a role to play if it came down to voting. It would be entirely possible for the community to 'vote' the feature out of usefulness…
If we need protection from ourselves as a whole I say the community isn't worth saving. That being said, I put more faith into this community than that. It just needs to be structured differently and I think the +- idea would work if structured correctly.
Stack Overflow is a site that's thought about this kind of stuff quite a bit – maybe it wouldn't be such a bad idea to take inspiration from how things work over there.
It wouldn't satisfy people like Tyche, of course, because tags aren't free-form, but it seems to work well enough for categorizing things. (That said, we might want a finer granularity of tags than what they have.)
The point of tags is to make finding useful information easier for people in general. For this to work, obviously the site interface must help (the current alphabetical list has its issues) but also having useless, noisy tags simply reduces the usefulness of appropriate tags – unless those noisy tags can be hidden away. Again, site interface can help, but obviously the community would have a role to play if it came down to voting. It would be entirely possible for the community to 'vote' the feature out of usefulness…