Tags are user-generated categories, sort of. You can tag the "Oak" artlcle with "tree" and "wood" in a little text box somewhere on the page, and if the "wood" tag doesn't already exist, it'll be created on the fly. Tags aren't as strict as categories (you can make spelling errors, for example, or taxonomic ones), which makes them good for wikipedia.
On 4/9/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
on 4/9/07 7:05 PM, Matthew Brown at morven@gmail.com wrote:
On 4/9/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
What is more likely to happen - and has momentum - is that categories will become more like tags. At this point, expect this vast hierarchy of category trees to get switched sideways.
I think that's largely a good idea and I hope it gets done. Tags are understood by most of the user population, I suspect, since they have already been exposed to them via places such as flickr, del.icio.us and others. They are less structured, of course, but structure requires agreement beyond that which is easy to obtain on enwiki.
If the software got smart (and the technology isn't patented, naturally) something like flickr's 'tag clusters' might be a neat idea as well.
Ok, humor this computer-language challenged person: what the hell is a "tag"?
Marc
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