[drupal-devel] Taxonomy Similar: Very Early First Draft

[Scott Courtney]

On Thursday 07 April 2005 16:01, Morbus Iff wrote:
> Saying that "horseriding" should REPLACE "horses", however, is inaccurate. 
> Node #3 has nothing to do with "horseriding", even though that tag would 
> appear on the "Similar Tags" list.

Hmmmm.... Yes, I can see your point. I may have been a little myopic in my
view, since on my sites our editorial policy is "always use the most-specific
tag". In my situation, all tags are created by trained staff and not by end
users, and even when I deploy free tagging, the tags will be reviewed by editors
just as we currently review fine-tune what controlled tags the submitter chose.
I agree with you, though, that not every site owner will follow that "most
specific tag" philosophy as we do.

What about this as an alternative, using your "horses" example? In this "UI
pseudocode" notation, let [R] imply a radio one-of-N button, and [ ] imply a
checkbox:

 > [R] The tag "horseriding" is just perfect, so keep it.
   [R] Use similar tag "horses" instead (3 matches).
   [R] Use similar tag "horse farming" instead (2 matches).
   [ ] Keep my "horseriding" tag *and* the similar tag I have selected.

The ">" next to the horseriding line indicates that this radio button is the
default choice. Since the checkbox (bottom line) is off by default, and the
original tag is the default radio button selection, the action if the user
just blindly hits SUBMIT is, as you have wisely defined, to change nothing at
all. Note that the last line customizes for each instance, to make its
intent very clear to the user.

If a novice user picks "horses" instead of "horseriding", the simple action
then becomes to do the most common task of choosing that instead (as the
prompt text indicates). But if they *really* want both tags, they can check
the last line's checkbox to make that happen.

If they check the "Keep ... and ..." line but don't select one of the similar
tags, no big deal -- just ignore the checkbox if they didn't change the tag.
No harm done.

The intent of what I'm proposing is to keep Morbus' design principle of
failing gracefully if the user submits the form without a lot of careful
thinking, but to prevent such a reflex from creating excessive tag counts.

Comments?

Scott

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