I agree with Derek on this one. The only real problem is the inconsistency. Introducing yet more terms into the mix just makes it worse. taxonomy.module -> taxonomy.module Categories -> Taxonomies (should just change in the menus and help text, right?) terms -> terms One small change and the inconsistency goes away. Taxonomy is already working it's way into the common vocabulary of the web. Derek Wright wrote:
[Am I the only one who thinks it's worth forking this monster thread into appropriately named subthreads to cover the various parallel conversations going on?]
On Nov 14, 2007, at 10:09 AM, Larry Garfield wrote:
That's again coming back to a very blog-centric view of taxonomy. Half the things I use taxonomy module for are not really "categories". If you enable free tagging, you're then talking about "tags", not really "categories". Category carries a lot of mental weight that is very limiting.
Right. -1 to renaming "term" to "category". -1 to renaming it to "tag", either, since that's just as limiting. I see nothing wrong with "term" -- it's simple enough for everyone to grasp, generic enough to be accurate for the various use cases, and is already burned into the consciousness of the existing Drupal community. Plus, there are a boatload of URLs, RSS feeds, etc that contain "term" in them -- changing it in the UI but not the URL or menu would be a huge step backwards, and there will be massive link rot to contend with if we change the URLs.
On the other hand, even bigger -1 for renaming "vocabulary" to "category", since in many cases, each term is a _category_ of the nodes that have it. Look at the project node vocabulary on d.o: each term ("Images", "Mail", "Vies", etc) is a category of modules that are related to that term. Calling this whole vocabulary a "category" is totally misleading and confusing -- it's a set of categories.
For a very non-"tag" and non-"category" usage of taxonomy, look at the "Drupal core compatibility" term on release nodes on d.o. "5.x" vs. "6.x" is *sort* of like a category, but not really. It's really part of the version string, it's a classification of releases based on core compatibility. I can't really wrap my head around thinking of this as a "category", and it's certainly not just a "tag"...
Finally, I agree with the last few comments in this thread that the biggest usability problem was the (IMHO foolish) decision to say "taxonomy is too scary, let's inconsistently refer to it as 'categories' in some places in the UI". That right there is the root of most of our trouble. Renaming the menu item back to just "taxonomy" and removing places in the UI (other than help texts) that use this ambiguous terminology would be a big win. I'd say "step forward", but it'd be a correction to our current regression. ;)
-Derek (dww)
p.s. If we end up renaming "taxonomy" to "classification", it *must* be in D7, since it's totally evil to have the menu paths, UI elements, module name, and function names all disagree. It'll be a huge task to port everything to hook_classification_*, and that *needs* to be D7, not D6.