[drupal-support] Article Content and taxonomies

[Andrew Cohill]

On Jun 9, 2005, at 4:02 AM, Christopher Taylor wrote:
>
> I don't know if Flexinode will work because the content will be 
> created by
> Citizens and Members.
> THey way not pay attention to volume and issue number per say.
>
>

If you have a relatively large group of untrained people creating 
content, in my experience you have to limit both the number of 
taxonomies and the number of items in each taxonomy.  People don't like 
to have to figure out how to classify things, and often do it 
incorrectly or not at all, which defeats your plan.

remember that every node already has a date and time on it, so it may 
not be necessary to add that again.

I wonder if just two taxonomies would work.

One taxonomy would be a list of the communities.

The second taxonomy would be a list of topics.

This will allow you to categorize material according by community and 
by topic.

The Volume and Issue information will be of relatively low value, since 
I can promise almost no one will ever try to retrieve anything that 
way.  No one will say, "I want to find an article in Volume Two, Issue 
5." And really, that style of classification is an anachronism designed 
to help librarians retrieve physical books. It does not add much value 
when you have full text search capabilities.

Instead, they will say, "I want to find that article about growing 
apples in your backyard."  And they will most likely use the full text 
search to find the article, not a taxonomy.

I call this the "big bucket, small bucket" problem.  When developing a 
system, the designers often try to create a large number of small 
buckets on the theory that highly classified information is good, since 
many of us grew up with libraries, which have detailed classification 
systems.  But those systems evolved in the absence of good search 
tools.

My preference is to start with a small number of large buckets, because 
there are fewer places to look for information.  With many small 
buckets (multiple taxonomies with many items), users have to go from 
bucket to bucket, saying, in essence, "Is it in here?  No.  Is it in 
here? No.  Is it in here?  No.....and so on."

If your system is successful and gets lots of use, you can add 
additional taxonomies and categories as you see what is popular.

Best regards,
Andrew
-------------------------------------------------
Andrew Michael Cohill, Ph.D.
Information architect

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