[drupal-devel] what do you call a rose?

[Dries Buytaert]

On 29 Sep 2005, at 09:21, Karoly Negyesi wrote:


> "free tagging" has 13,300 results while folksonomy has 1,220,000  
> results according to googlefight. It's not that "free tagging" is  
> bad, it's just that we are creating another barrier. Look at  
> taxonomy vs. categories... it's still more accessible to call it  
> "categories" while the savvy developer know that "Drupal  
> categories" is another name for a rose called "taxonomy". I am  
> ready to admit that "free tagging" is not folksonomy, but again,  
> taxonomy vs. categories. You can say that taxonomy vs. categories  
> is the camel nose in the tent. I will disagree.

Today, I attended a presentation on 'usability in content management  
systems'.  According to their research, one of the key problems is  
the use of technical jargon and system details/internals being  
exposed to the user.  According to them, the answer to the following  
question should be 'yes':

   Does the system use natural, non-technical language?

I tend to agree, and don't regret changing 'taxonomy' to  
'categories'.  Furthermore, I'm all for renaming 'path alias' to  
'custom URL'.  I'll continue to commit patches that eliminate  
technical jargon from Drupal.

We don't name insects by their Latin/classification name either; we  
don't care what the insect is really called or how it ought to be  
classified.  Unless you are John VanDyck, a bug is a bug.

PS: I attended 10 CMS presentations given by commercial CMS vendors  
today.  Quite an eye opener ...

--
Dries Buytaert  ::  http://www.buytaert.net/