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dw_suggestions2010-05-16 04:09 pm
True Tag Categories and Sub-Categories
Title:
True Tag Categories and Sub-Categories
Area:
Tags
Summary:
Currently, there's a limit to the tags' number of characters (I think it's 40 or so), and it's rather cumbersome to have categories for the writer, which could be helped with a true sub-category system.
Description:
Lets say that you like Harukanaru Toki no Naka de's character Abe no Yasuaki. Lets say you want to write about him and tag the entry accordingly, but by virtue of the subject, your tag looks something like this: "anime/manga/game: harukanaru toki no naka de: abe no yasuaki" which goes waaay beyond the character limit for tags.
Not only that, it's rather cumbersome as well, and if you already have an anime, a manga and a game category, you must fill out those as well for them to appear under the appropriate tags.
However, if you use sub-tags, you could associate the tag "abe no yasuaki" with "harukanaru toki no naka de" which in turn can be a sub-tag of "anime", "manga" AND "game".
So if you type "abe no yasuaki" under tags, it appears on pages underneath "anime: harukanaru toki no naka de", "manga: harukanaru toki no naka de", "game: harukanaru toki no naka de", "anime", "game" and "manga".
Same with "harukanaru toki no naka de" which appears in "anime", "game" and "manga".
And if you're reviewing the Harukanaru Toki no Naka de game, and tag it, it would show up in "game: harukanaru toki no naka de: review", "game: harukanaru toki no naka de", "game", AND top tag "review", as well as the associated anime/manga tags for "harukanaru toki no naka de".
This system would allow for easier tagging for users, as they wont have to remember to type a tag for every category (1 for the character, 3 for the series, 3 for the medium in our example, that makes 7 tags for one very basic category. If you've made icons, fan artwork, fan fiction, fan videos, cosplay and so on, the amount of tags needed quickly rise) in order for it to show up in the relevant areas, making them more likely to tag all the appropriate tags, and thus making it easier for readers to find the posts they're interested in.
The drawbacks is that this system could be hard to create and debug. First, one must overhaul the "Manage Tags" area and any other page where tags can be managed and created in order to make users able to associate tags in order of priority (tags, sub-tags, sub-sub-tags and so on).
Then one must make sure that the users cannot make a tag both the top tag and a sub-tag (something like having both "anime: haruknaru toki no naka de" and "harukanaru toki no naka de: anime" at the same time).
On the other hand, it is a very user-friendly system once implemented, and something I've wished for in many of the journal sites I've been on, because many times, be it Harry Potter, Inuyasha or other series, they often have several incarnations, and sometimes, like with anime, manga and games, it's hard to pick which to associate it with (You could argue that you go with the first medium, but then there's series like Saint Seiya, which started as manga but is more famous for the anime), and as a reader to know which one the author associate the series with.
If this system is too much to incorporate, I would at least suggest for the tag character limit to be upped from 40 to 100 (as a reference: the longest English dictionary word is 45 characters long, already 5 characters over the limit).
This suggestion:
Should be implemented as-is.
20 (47.6%)
Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
5 (11.9%)
Shouldn't be implemented.
7 (16.7%)
(I have no opinion)
10 (23.8%)
(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)
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This is what I have a problem with, because I don't think it would not fit all users.
For example, I use 2010 (and the other years) as both : 2010 is the top category when I'm mentioning events, but a sub-tag when I'm talking about the books I read.
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games
games:online
games:online:wow
games:online:wow:mage
I see no downside here. (Besides, of course, the sleepless hours filled with frustration for whatever
fooldedicated programmer takes up the task.)no subject
Perhaps separately categories and tags would be cleaner and allow for the greatest flexibility of usage?
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FirstLevelTag: SecondLevelTag: ThirdLevelTag (et cetera)
If you then click on SecondLevelTag, all posts in Second and Third are shown. If you click on FirstLevelTag, First, Second and Third are shown. And you only need to add the lowest tag (like ThirdLevelTag) to get this effect, instead of having to add tags for every level.
Does that make sense? (I suck at explanations like these.)
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You're assuming that a tag like books/sci-fi and films/sci-fi would both have (or should have) sci-fi as the same tag, and that's made your post somewhat confusing.
At the moment, you could only have one sci-fi tag with the way Dreamwidth works, and it could only be a child of either books or films (and Dreamwidth ignores child tags at the moment anyway, having them only in the database). If you read the comments on bug 1834, you'll notice this issue was already flagged.
The most loggical and easiest fix to this is to allow duplicate tags like sci-fi to exist, so that films/sci-fi and books/sci-fi are completely different tags. That is, anything tagged under sci-fi under books is NOT tagged under sci-fi under films, and if the user wants to have the same structure for sci-fi under both, they can sort it out themselves. This is the method I'm working on exploring at the moment.
Your suggestion, if I understand correctly, is slightly different to bug 1834 and nested tags because you'd like sci-fi to be the same tag under both books and films but you'd like Dreamwidth to cope with this. I think you want Dreamwidth to know the difference of tags filed under books/sci-fi/space opera and films/sci-fi/space opera, even as sci-fi/space opera is the same tags for both boks and films. I think you'd even like it so you could have films/sci-fi/horror and films/horror to tag Alien, for example.
If that's right, I can visualise what you want and how to make it happen. However, it's a completely different kettle of fish to nested tagging because I'd have to use networks and not trees to display the data (your supscription network on Dreamwidth is an example of a network, as is the train system and road network) to do this and there'd be no choice but to make films/horror/sci-fi point to Alien as well.
It's a nice idea, because many humans do think naturally in networks, so it makes sense to store things in like that. However, computers work really badly on networks and simple networks can be easily turned into trees by duplicating tags as I mentioned above (on condition that there aren't too many tags or too much interconnection between tags, something I believe is broadly true fot the vast majority of users) so I'm inclined to shelve your idea for now as too long and too complicated and stick to tree-like tags only, which are simpler.
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I was as confused at what you were saying initially, as everyone else here. Having written this and read back your post, I realise what you're actually on about and I realised that what I had said did express your issues correctly but I otherwise completely missed the point. I hope you'll forgive me, because I was trying to turn your comments into technical details in my head, and that tends to make my mind go down certain well worn paths, and I have to get to the bottom of them before I can come back up and take a different one.
Clearly you envisage having a massively interconnected tagging system and finding that a problem to manage, which makes my last paragraph quite insulting as I've said you don't exist ;). You've come up with some good and practical ways to hack a tree-like system to make updating tags easier, and for large tags like the ones you've used as an example, I don't blame anyone for wanting ways to shorten typing things in. It's clear some people will have problems managing tags in the future if they have lots of duplicates, as you clearly want to. Your problem is that you're thinking way too far ahead :) No one has managed to write a nested tagging system yet and you're already pointing out how to improve it if someone had. Which isn't a bad thing at all as it helps in writing the specification (bug 1834). My mind is so far focused on what the back end of Dreamwidth is doing that I can't think about simple things like that on the front end.
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