[documentation] Tag clouds and documentation

[Lee Hunter]

I hear what you're saying about free-tagging and the risk of things
degenerating into a meaningless soup.

I think the solution might be to allow free tagging but not have the
tags cast in stone.

As I mentioned recently on another thread, I think this is where
Wikipedia got it exactly right. Anyone can add a "category"
(effectively free tagging)  but editors are encouraged to aggressively
refactor and reword those tags wherever it makes sense. Also a page
can appear in multiple hierarchies (you can discover Ronald Reagan by
navigating through movie stars, shooting survivors, politicians etc.)

That way, you get the world view of the individual user, which is
often surprising, idiosyncratic and useful (e.g. when they propose
something like "survivors of shootings") and you get the collective
wisdom of the other editors that say "Great idea, but let's make the
category 'shooting survivors' not 'survivors of shootings' and let's
make that a sub-category of "shooting victims".

Lee Hunter
Technical Editor

On Mon, Sep 8, 2008 at 5:00 PM, christopher calicott <purrin at binary.net> wrote:
> 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/
>
> --
> Pending work: http://drupal.org/project/issues/documentation/
> List archives: http://lists.drupal.org/pipermail/documentation/
>