Karen Stevenson wrote:

I think one simple change would make a world of difference without 'dumbing' anything down. As was mentioned before, the most confusing thing is the word 'vocabulary' since it's not obvious, even if you know figure out that taxonomy is way of categorizing things, what exactly a vocabulary is. So just change vocabulary to either 'category type' or 'category group', then we have a much more clear breakdown of:

taxonomy -> categories vocabulary -> category type (or category group) term -> category (or term)

term == category Yes, that's the main thing! When taxonomy is referred to as "categories" (plural), it's not clear what exactly a single "category" is. I don't think this is stated anywhere. If we can call "terms" (in developer space) "categories" (in newbie user space), we'll have made a significant step forward. "Vocabularies" are categories of "categories" or meta-categories. They are categories -- not categories of nodes, but categories of categories. Chris Messina is not wrong when he calls them categories, too, but this doesn't help to understand how it works. Meta-categories are clearly beyond what the average user wants to deal with when he installs Drupal for the first time. Taxonomy is the entire mechanism. Renaming it to "categories" doesn't help, because it creates a simplified expectation. I propose to rename taxonomy -> classification because this is exactly what we're doing: we're classifying the content, not more and not less. I believe that "classification" is something that the user can understand, and it's abstract enough to keep him from jumping to conclusions. I like David Strauss' idea of providing a free-tagging vocabulary named "Tags" that's enabled by default. Put this on the first tab under Administer|Classification. Add an "Advanced" tab with explanations and a button to remove the Tags vocabulary (and these two "beginner" tabs) and enable the full taxonomy system. Two clicks shouldn't place an undue burden on those who want to go straight to the full taxonomy system. Hans