[development] Renaming "taxonomy" terminology? (was Re: Early Drupal 6 review from Chris Messina)

[Robert Douglass]

Thank you! I've never agreed with introducing the "category" pollution. 
It is not that hard to understand the words vocabulary and term. There 
are other interface problems with taxonomy.module that make the whole 
experience somewhat confusing and renaming these two components will 
never help that. Furthermore, it is not always clear what one *can* or 
*should* do with taxonomy.module (and this is largely a learning process 
that can't be avoided or replaced), and renaming vocabulary and term 
won't help with this either. My vote is for aligning on the words 
taxonomy and term and finding other targets (like the hierarchy 
terminology, which is awful) where simple semantics can make a difference.

-Robert

Derek Wright wrote:
> 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.
> ...snip...
> 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. ;)