50books_poc | Tagging poll

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Tagging poll

Hey all,

So we're still working out how to revamp the current tagging system, especially since we've run against the 1000-tag limit twice in about two months.

From comments here, it seems as though most people use the author tags, and a few people would like tags with even more granularity (i.e. tags to find entries by who posted).

However, given LJ's tag limit, it doesn't seem feasible to keep all the tags on LJ, unless we cut down on what we tag. Currently, the author tags comprise of about 500+ tags, with the rest being a mish-mash of genre, race, ethnicity, nationality, and subject.

We've also been thinking of using our Delicious to tag posts on the comm and using a combination of Delicious + LJ. The combination would be something like keeping all the author tags on LJ and then putting tags for other things on Delicious.

A geeky table with benefits and downsides!

	LiveJournal	Delicious + LJ combination
Benefits	All in one place Users can tag their own entries We know how it works	No limit on tags Ability to search on a combination of tags (ex. find all the entries on books set in India posted by sanguinity) Some tags still viewable from LJ
Downsides	Limit to number of tags, meaning we will have to not tag certain things No ability to narrow down searches	Hard to keep coordinated Putting the tags solely on Delicous means fewer people will see them More work for mods

[Poll #1429226]

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I don't think I've commented before about the tags, but I use the general categories (YA, Asian American, etc.) more than author, personally--though I have often thought that searching by who posted would be useful!

I've never found Delicious that user-friendly, even though everyone seems to love it--but in order to keep the tags as wide-ranging as before I would learn to love it too. ;)

But! I am also not wanting to put tons of work on the mods.

All that to say I can't even decide how to vote in the poll, eep!

I don't think I've commented before about the tags, but I use the general categories (YA, Asian American, etc.) more than author

Same here. Also, I'm thinking that these tags might be easier to keep in check than the author tags - if this community goes on for a few more years, people might write about more than 1000 authors, and then what do we do then?

I don't feel terribly strongly either way, but I tend to be in favor of erring on the side of more tags (I like granularity). And even more than that, I love the idea of filtering by a combination of tags -- finding all YA by African-American writers (or similar) would be very useful to me.

I think I have a delicious account, but I haven't used it. So while I like the potential benefits of delicious and would really appreciate being able to look at all of the posts by

oyceter of a given genre, I have some questions.

When you say "more work for mods", does that mean that only the mods would be able to tag things on delicious? Because that does seem like more work, and I'd be reluctant to vote that kind of work on you folk just because I want it. But I'm not sure that that's what you're saying.

And if I'm wrong about that, how difficult is it to learn how to use the tagging system of delicious?

I know that if everyone were willing to use the system, I'd be happy to tag my posts both with our LJ tagging scheme and our delicious tagging scheme. I would derive enough benefit out of that to support the dual system.

But I also think that if we were keeping some tags on LJ, it would make more sense to me to keep the genre/category tags on LJ because I think they'd be more useful to casual users of the system than the author tags.

When you say "more work for mods", does that mean that only the mods would be able to tag things on delicious?

Probably. The thing with Delicious is that you have to have access to the account to tag, so either only the mods would tag, or we'd have to give out the password to every comm member so they could. If people have individual accounts, they can tag something "for:50books_poc authorname race genre etc" and the mods will be able to see what tags were used there, but we'd still have to add it individually.

I'm actually ok with the work involved, since that is the big reason I joined on as a mod!

Thanks for the input!

What if we kept the individual author tags here on LJ, but moved the tags that are most likely going to be crossreferenced (like YA and Asian or S/FF and Carribean) to delicious?

Or we could just get rid of the individual author tags, or index the individual authors in the memories or some place else so that people can still look them up but they're not kept as tags. That way you can still see what authors have been done here. Because I think author tags are the ones LEAST likely to need the crossreferencing.

I do hope that genre tags at the very least remain here on LJ, because it's nice to have all the SF/F reads or all the historical reads just a click away.

It seems like doing something about the 500+ individual author tags is best, because a lot of those authors are only going to pop up here once or twice, and if we're really lucky, we get a lot of different individual authors (maybe more than 5000! Wouldn't that be wonderful!) in the coming months and years. So if we index that somewhere that doesn't have a size limit, it'll keep tags manageable and the comm searchable. And that opens up 500 more tags.

I do realize that would mean a lot of work for the mods to go over the many, many entries here and make an index or move the tag, but I would be willing to help if my help was needed. I'm not so good with a lot of technical stuff, but I can operate LJ pretty well and I can learn!

The genre tags are actually a fairly small set of tags; it's probably feasible to keep them here on the comm. (Or rather, have them in both places: it is nice to be able to cross-reference genre and nationality, say, and LJ doesn't let you cross-reference tags like delicious does.)

Yeah, at some point the author tags are gonna break the tag limit. We'll eventually need a plan for that.

I like the idea of using both LJ and Delicious, but I think it might be a more feasible long-term solution to have the author tags on Delicious, since they're more numerous and thus more likely to outgrow LJ's tag limit. I don't use the tags much, but I'm much more likely to use the genre/subject/ethnicity/race tags than the author ones, and if that's the more common use, I think it also makes sense to have those tags directly accessible from the community.

I would really hate to lose the individual author tags on LJ.

A combo seems best for the users, but I don't want to inflict extra work on the mods.

I agree that the author tags need to come off the LJ tag system as unsustainable given the data limits, and think they should either be moved to the memory system or delicious.

I like the idea of using delicious as one of the things I really hate about LJ tags is that you can't crossreference.

If you needed another mod for delicious tagging, I'd be happy to help out.

I like the author tags. If I read one book by an author I often want to read more. I like seeing what others have said about the author. I find their is some redundancy in some of the tags: black american, black-american, African-American, for example, fiction and novel or historical fiction and historical. WE might eliminate some of the redundancy, but that would not gain us all the tags we may need some day. I like having the tags on LJ, but will be happy to use whatever the comm comes up with.

I didn't vote because I'm conflicted; I would rather have more tags and the search/functionality associated with the tags but don't want to create more work for the mods. I'd like to help if I can.

Would the system be similar to how

metafandom does it with its tags? Though their system is different in that they link to posts, their tags seem to be all on delicious but are included in the posts.

We could technically do that, but the difference is in that Metafandom solely does link collection, while we mostly do posts. So what would happen is the posts tagged over a certain period of time would be reposted to the community with the Delicious tags under each entry... I don't know, that might be kind of spammy for some people? Although maybe it would be helpful to people as well?

The big thing is that it might not actually help with the tags... you'd be able to click on the tags in the entry to go to Delicious tags, but they still wouldn't be organized on LJ in any way.

I think it could be less spammy if posts (from individual LJs as opposed to the comm one; some people already just link to their LJ posts) were aggregated into a daily/weekly/periodic post similar to Metafandom; however, I think the posts themselves would lose a lot of the community feel by virtue of not being posted on the actual comm.

In terms of creating a combination, what about putting all tags on Delicious and then also keeping non-author/editor/etc tags on LJ (as opposed to the suggestion of keeping author tags on LJ) since the author tags are taking up most of the tag spaces and since the number of them increases the most quickly. This could extend to tags for posters/users too if/when those are implemented.

As much as organizing is fun, this is a pretty large undertaking so good luck!

I'd like to see about using Dreamwidth. It cross-posts to LJ really well and has a user-friendliness-driven code development system rather than an advertising-revenue-driven code development system. On the other hand, I don't know what their tag limit is. I am merely trying to drag people over to the dark side, really.

(I have a spare code if needed).

I have thought about DW, though I haven't checked with the other mods yet, so this is just me speaking.

I'd love to move over, but the problems are that a) you can't import communities and I'm not sure the DW team is planning on changing that (it has to do with getting the permission of all the individual entry writers on the comm and how they'd rather err on the side of caution) and b) you can't auto-crosspost to communities. I also checked, and the tag limit is the same (1000 for free accounts).

I think maybe the community can cut down on the number of tags if it organizes it in a different way. Right now, there are a lot of redundant tags- there's probably no need to have all three of woman writers, women writers and women's fiction, for example, or sf/f, sff, sf/fantasy, and fantasy- and a few that I doubt get much use- ohio is my favorite one of these.

What if we had a system for what tags we needed, instead? Like, there could be a set number of genres, along with major religions, ethnicities, and places. And maybe a few odd ones, like 'women writers (a tag I do like, we just don't need three versions of it) or 'translation'. We could also cut down on the number of author/editor/illustrator tags, if that's the main problem, if we did something like "author whose last name starts with A" instead of every author having their own tag. It would be a lot of work at the beginning, but I think once it was set up, the system would maintain itself.

But maybe you've already thought of all this! Sorry to be unhelpful in that case. It's just what I think about whenever I'm tagging a post, and I thought I'd suggest it.

Yeah, we've thought about that. I think reducing redundancy would help a little, but really, it's the author tags taking up the most space.

I had also come up with a scheme of tagging race, ethnicity, and nationality in different tags (i.e. "race: asian, ethnicity: chinese, nationality: taiwan" instead of "asian, chinese-taiwan"), as it would get rid of more overlap. But the problem is that LJ doesn't let you search between tags, so if you wanted to find the intersection between books with Chinese characters set in Taiwan, it's basically impossible. Ergo the thought of going to Delicious! I'm not sure if that's what you meant though?

But yes, once a new system is agreed on, we definitely want to just stick with certain tags... either I'll look over posts and edit the tags when they're posted, or we'll set permissions so only mods can create new tags and have a "needs new tag" tag for things that need a new tag.

But the problem is that LJ doesn't let you search between tags, so if you wanted to find the intersection between books with Chinese characters set in Taiwan, it's basically impossible.

Ah, yeah, I see the problem. I guess I'm just not used to using Delicious, and so am reluctant to learn new things, heh. I am in vast admiration of your efforts, by the way!

I like the author tags and don't like delicious - which is unhelpful, I know! I guess a combo might be the best solution. I would mind author tags on lj and other tags on delicious.

But there are a huge number of redundant tags. For example: (auto)biography, autobiograhy, autobiographical novel, autobiography, autubiography, biography and memoir could probably all be combined. As could tags like woman writers/women writers, or african american/african-american. And some of the place tags could be less specific. For example, America or US could do in place of american south, american southwest, american west, california, ohio, new york, los angeles, etc. There could also be less specific tags for genres, for example combining fantasy, sf/f, sf/fantasy, sff, space opera, etc. And then there are some tags which are just a bit weird, for example 'peter'.

Which is a ton of extra work for you mods, sorry. But it would free up more tags and could make the tags easier to use - just one tag to click on to find autobiographies, rather than seven!

Oh, the tag reorganization is definitely still on the plate! But I think getting rid of all the redundancies won't solve the tag limit problem, especially if we want to introduce new tags, like for who posted about a book. The redundancies are actually a fairly small set out of the total number of tags.

I know. I don't like delicious I think it's probably the only option without getting rid of author tags, which would be a shame. Also, I get that it would be good to search with more than one tag - and I like the idea of having tags for who posted about a book.

And I'm sure you've already got plenty of people, but if you need any other volunteers I'd be happy to help out.

The only option I can think of to keep a semblance of author's tags but keep it all on LJ is to have tags that go:

authors: aa-am, authors am-az, authors ba-bm etc.

But that is fairly limited because there's already 26 distinct authors in aa-am say.

If you go with delicious for author tags I wonder if you could do something where one of the LJ tags that was put on every post was "view other posts tagged with this/these authors names". So when you clicked on that tag the top entry (backdated... or frontdated whatever I mean) would be a post saying "here is the link to delicious where all the author tags are". This would just be to keep things clear for comm readers who don't know what's going on.

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