[documentation] Tag clouds and documentation

[christopher calicott]

The thing about tags' effectiveness and search, the way I am seeing  
it, is that it is all tied into how well thought-out and structured  
your taxonomy/IA is.  I'm starting work currently on an interactive  
travel directory site that is essentially based on the taxonomy system  
in Drupal.   For the primary way someone navigates through a site,  
tags or taxonomy /can/ be a more usable experience for people.    
Rather than the decade+ old-school way of drilling down into a site,  
provided your admins understand how to effectively tag new bits of  
content, users can do what I refer to as "noodling" through a site,  
where every page they land upon is somewhere they want to be, rather  
than a single step on the path to arriving where they are trying to go.

Free tagging can absolutely kill usability and search results, like  
you say.  I want to be able to give users the ability to tag things  
and augment the meta information of pages, but I'm thinking the best  
way to handle this is a balanced or weighted system that measures our  
site editors' structured descriptions strongly, and then tempers the  
weight of free tagging, whether done by users or our editors.   We  
don't want to give users' "votes" any less value, so they are weighted  
the same as editors' votes in the free tagging, but all of the votes  
are then given a lesser weight with regards to the structured taxonomy  
for each page that they are initially put into, because tags usually  
get played fast and loose, and aren't meant to be completely  
authoritative.

Now, this is obviously the documentation list.. I just kind of joined  
in the discussion here, which feels slightly off-topic, except that I  
think Taxonomy is something that needs a lot more than simple  
documentation...  Itneeds more of the ideas behind it and  
documentation of "approaches" and things...

I tend to just be silent on the list because Documentation discussion  
at DrupalCon Boston seemed, frankly, a little "we don't do things that  
way around here..." and it sucks making helpful suggestions and  
getting shot down, so I just keep fairly quiet and edit bad grammar,  
et cetera, occasionally.  I really would like to see people like me  
having a much more clear path to doing bigger edits and additions to  
documentation, without fear of reprisal.   Having said that, if anyone  
has a place in mind to include some ideas/additions on this topic,  
please let me know and I'll get on it this week.

have a good day,
-=- christopher





On Sep 8, 2008, at 10:37 AM, Steven Peck wrote:

> Other than saying 'tags will help' do you have a better hierarchy  
> suggestion?
>
> My experience with tags in general on many other sites has been that
> they also pollute search results into rabbit warrens of unrelated
> pages.  I am not against tags, just not seeing them as a magic bullet
> currently.  I am loathe to just 'tack things on' while we have a
> redesign project starting up.
>
> On Mon, Sep 8, 2008 at 10:13 AM, Lee Hunter <lee.hunter at hum.com>  
> wrote:
>> That's an excellent example, Tony.
>>
>> I would imagine that the topic of connecting with databases would be
>> one of the most popular subjects on a PHP framework site and, sure
>> enough, "database" is the largest item in the CakePHP cloud. When I
>> click on "database" I get all the relevant tagged articles.
>>
>> Contrast that with the user experience on Drupal.org.  Searching for
>> even the most common topics means that I have to either do a search
>> (which is messy and unreliable) or I make a series of attempts to
>> crawl down some obliquely-labeled rabbit holes (FAQ, How-to, etc.)
>> that lead me into a maze of unhelpful subheadings until I finally
>> stumble across enough information to satisfy my need (although I'll
>> never know whether or not I've found everything on the subject) or I
>> just collapse in exhaustion.
>>
>> :)
>>
>> Lee Hunter
>> Technical Editor
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Sep 8, 2008 at 12:55 PM, Tony Narlock <skiquel at mac.com>  
>> wrote:
>>
>>> See an example here: http://bakery.cakephp.org/
>> --
>> Pending work: http://drupal.org/project/issues/documentation/
>> List archives: http://lists.drupal.org/pipermail/documentation/
>>
> --
> Pending work: http://drupal.org/project/issues/documentation/
> List archives: http://lists.drupal.org/pipermail/documentation/