What do you think of a taxonomist feature (see details)?

I think that is an excellent idea! I really make sure to tag my questions so the right people are getting them, it would be awesome if every question was tagged correctly.

Wow…following!

I already do this on another site, but I’m not volunteering here, yet.

Sounds like a good idea to me.
As a side note, I try and keep my tags simple: one word, as descriptive as possible. I’ve noticed that some people use multiple word topics and wonder if that can mess things up a bit.

Sounds good to me, because I seem to struggle with my topics.

Don’t make me a taxomonderist! I’ll seriously screw things up!

Stuffing dead animals?

I think a better name to describe this would be curator. Just a thought.

I think this is a great idea. Tempted to volunteer…

I love the idea. This is a role that I would love to have. The editor in me twitches at the lack of capitalization (don’t worry I would follow the guidelines) on topics now. Also, I am always very concerned that topics be broad enough for the database.

Also, i hate it when people use the topics for commentary or humor.

I like it. I’m not thrilled with the word “taxonomist”, and agree with @Mtl_zack about “curator”. Seems more fitting to the site, somehow.

I third “curator”.

This is a relatively controversy free feature (though I can think of people making it into one) and I wouldn’t mind doing it.

I wouldn’t worry about the name. We’re not going to call it anything once it’s out of beta so the name is more or less irrelevant.

Here’s what I’d really like some feedback on: What do you think the guidelines for editing topics should include? (e.g. rules on capitalization, etc.)

@timtrueman Maybe keep all topics to one word, not a single word but each topic being one word.

Proper capitalization and spelling, at the very least.

Would this be accompanied by some changes to the rules for the topic tags themselves?—for example:
— allow punctuation and special characters
— allow user’s capitalization to withstand automatic overrides
— allow tags to remain in the user’s chosen sequence
— allow more characters for longer phrases
— display the rearranged and truncated tags in previews instead of surprising us

I suppose this would be the end of using the topic tags themselves in a humorous way.

I can see some benefit to this (and I have no objection to the term ‘taxonomist’), but I don’t care for the idea of letting people override users’ own classifications.

For example, in this question of mine, I wouldn’t mind if someone added the topic trash, but I would object if someone decided to change environment to ecology. I was mildly annoyed that jars and bottles acquired initial caps.

It would become very tiresome to have to police our own questions to make sure someone hadn’t messed them up.

I hope this is not part of a move toward a category-based structure with category “owners” and point champions and all that. Please say it isn’t.

follows

I think this is marvelous. I think it can help a lot. It depends on how you structure it though.

Can the taxonomist take away keywords as well as add them? Are you going to structure this like flickr, where any registered user may add words but non may take away? Are you thinking of a group of taxonomists like moderators or a fluther-wide editing capacity?

You might need a paid head taxonomist [especially if taxonomistsu can remove tags] to clear questions and then draw a volunteer pool, same model as moderators.

The ability to remove seems important. It would 1. remove irrelevant labels as long as it 2. does not interfere with the OP’s Q and the type of info gathered. [IU know I put in some gag tags sometimes, and I have seen many that should have been gags but probably weren’t]

@Jeruba would you mind if the caps were removed from “Jars” and “Bottles”—never mind—I see you didn’t do it. That is stuff I would like to see fixed.

@timtrueman doews the server language you are using necessitate a limitation of characters? Would it be worthwhile to further limit to allow no caps so uniformity was easier? No underscores? just keywords and commas either runtogether, “run together, format?

@Jeruba brings up a good point. I think it’s good to make sure people are using appropriate tags, but what comes with that is changing what someone already put some thought into. I think only being able to add tags might be a good idea. The exception being joke tags, if only in the general section.

I need keyboard character stickers. Any merciful Flutherite who has some they don’t want can send—tell me pm—i am still looking to buy them at a store

UIO always mixed ERT always mixed NM pretty bad and my C looks like a G and my G looks like a C and my L mow looks like ;

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Do it. Seriously.
Just be careful who you allow do it.

Hmmm. I’ll just observe and see what happens.

Sounds good to me. Who would be the taxonomists then? I just hope that they’re fairness people.

I think its good to only add tags, not remove or change ones already chosen. Even if the tags the user put there seem wrong or out of place. People will get extremely annoyed if their own tags are changed or removed.

Some things I’m not sure about -

* Correcting typos/capitalisation errors (but please do not assume a British spelling is a typo or error)
* Removing foreign-word tags
* Removing humourous tags on questions in General section

I think removal or changing of tags ought to be left to Fluther staff or mods, but maybe a taxonomist can flag a tag as needing attention.

And for the record, I have no problem with the name “taxonomist”. After all, it only means “one who names/classifies things”.

It sounds like a good idea. I wonder, however, would that mean that topics like this would be forbidden?

@Simone_De_Beauvoir Heh, you said “doing it”.

@augustlan So, what’s the proper spelling, God or god? OH SNAP! Controversy!

I’m not sure about the correction of spelling.
Sometimes to make a point, folks will write for example, “I’m gonna git you” instead of “I’m going to get you”. It is intentional and may change the whole flavor of the answer.
Or am I not understanding your proposal?

Metafilter did this and it worked really well. There were about 70K post/questions before they added tagging so they had some people go through and tag ones that didn’t have tags and needed cleaning up. Everyone was happy.

The purpose of tagging stuff is to help you find things so fixing spelling should be important. It is worthless without proper spelling.

bob_ :: I don’t think tags like those should be removed. But it would be nice if some relevant tags were added. Maybe there could be a predifined list of tags people could add.

Like:
Apple
Computers
Health
Exercise
Travel
Food
Sex
Relationships
Obama
...And so on.

And then you have tag diarrhea like this. OS X, London, and screwdriver as tags in a question about about what the worst first day of work you have had. WTF?? That shit needs cleaned up.

@wilma not spelling in the conversational thread. Spelling of the tags that help categorize the question. Putting in keyword tags is part of the process of asking a Q.

I like “taxonomist” better than “curator” because that is what it is [even though my first thought is of a stuffed animal in a 19th century museum].. They could be called “taxis” for short, mebbe?

Curatorial work is very different.

Hail! If you’re gonna pay someone to do it, I’ll do it! Thangs could get real interestin’ around here!

Re spelling in the topics AND in the question section….might get the word out that spell check doesn’t automatically kick in in either of those fields. If you right-click you have a “check spelling” option which you have to manually activate.

I like “curator” because it simply sounds like you’re “curing” something. It’s easier to say too.

Don’t worry about the name since there won’t be one.

not even something like, ‘the curator formerly known as taxonomist’? tcfkat

I like the idea very much. As @bob_ stated, I wouldn’t want the longer phrases on topics to be removed unless it’s offensive. The inconsistent capitalizations could be corrected. I would like to see misspellings cleared up also.

The truncation is because there is only room for 31 characters in the database based on the way topics were created and defined years ago. We plan on fixing that sooner rather than later but not in the first release of this feature. (The reason for waiting is we have to take the site down when making database changes and we have some other topic-related database changes not quite ready—and we’d rather take the site down only once.)

No more fun with creative tags? Darn.

@zenele Did you want to start being funny? OH SNAP!

Not really a question on the feature itself, but how exactly will this be executed? You say there won’t even be a name for it, so does that mean people who are doing this will not be known to every one? I was assuming they would get like a “taxonomist” badge on their profile or something. Will this be added to the current mods duties or will a new group of users be doing this?

It would be great to get help with tags. It would even be more awesome if they were cleaned up and the search would function better. :)

I think we should call them “taggers” ;)

My first reaction to this idea is that it might compromise the OP’s question. I am not sure if I would like the idea of someone have the power and authority to go into my questions to remove tags, add tags and fix spelling errors. As it stands I like the policy of sending a question back for editing until it meets the proper guidelines. Upon further reflection I do understand that this would make Fluther more professional and easier to search which of course is the goal if we want Fluther to make money and stick around. I think the most logical way to carry this out would be to have a Fluther employee do the job. That would help to lessen and/or eliminate the hurt feelings that go along with editing someone else’s work and keep those who are edited from interpreting the changes as personal attacks or vendettas.

@SuperMouse This has only to do with topics, nothing else. It won’t push questions back to the OP. It won’t affect matching (until we make some changes). Basically all it means is poorly tagged questions will be more consistently tagged. If you do a good job nobody is going to touch your topics. It means questions tagged with only one or two topics will get more comprehensive topics and questions not tagged properly will get fixed.

The fixing of spelling is only for topics. Nothing else…

Just in the last three hours we had two examples of why this is important:
http://s.timtrueman.com/badtopics1.png
http://s.timtrueman.com/badtopics2.png

Categorisers?, allocators?, assigners?, streamliners?, tidy-upperers?

Fine, providing that the unexpurgated version can still be viewed if required.

@lloydbird there will be a publicly available log of changes (which we can use to revert back to any point).

@timtrueman Fine then. Nicely done.

I’m all for this idea.

→ Do you need any clarifications on what the role of a taxonomist is?
Negative. They are like the Cleaners in Labyrinth. But with less dangerous tools.

→ What do you think the guidelines for taxonomists should include?
Guidelines for the people or for the tags? Assuming it’s for the people, then I’m not really sure. As long as they aren’t jerks and abuse the job they have to do, it sounds like a pretty straightforward duty to me.
I did notice you asked about guidelines for the tags themselves. Apart from proper grammar, spelling and capitalization, I’m not too sure what else could be changed. Getting rid of the topics that are irrelevant and adding a few that are relevant could really help.

→ What about this excites you and what concerns you?
No more bs in the topics excites me. I understand where people want to use humor and inside jokes in the topics because it can be fun.. but for people outside of the inside circle, it’s pretty annoying. Fluther is for questions and answers. Topics help direct those questions to people who can answer them the best. When people add in random and pointless topics, it doesn’t do any good for the question.
I’m a little sick of tags that mention a specific person. With the exception of 10/20/30k party threads.. then you can tag as you wish. It IS a party, after all. I’m guilty of tagging things in a pretty stupid way, but it’s never been to the extent of needing an entire sentence for a topic at least not in a while.

Concerns: The bitching about change that is going to take place.

→ Any other feedback is welcome!
The last time I even heard anyone mention the questions for you section, it was made known that it didn’t really work like intended. Like, people would get questions irrelevant to anything they have in their profile, or the questions that are tagged with what’s in their profile wouldn’t show up in that section. Has it been fixed, or is this part of what would be changed?

Since I’m very gung-ho about organization, I love this idea. Proper tagging is both aesthetically important, and helpful with matching algorithms, so of course I fully support this.

¶ There should be general guidelines with respect to tag selection, and structure. For example, capitalization is important (I agree with @Jeruba). Only proper names should be capitalized. Some other things that need to be considered are the suffix choices and the number of synonyms. Should is be “movie” or “movies”, “game” or “games”? Not critical, but I think consistency is nice. When a post is general, how many synonyms of a word should it be tagged with? If you have a post about marijuana, is it helpful to tag it with “pot”, “grass”, “dope”, etc?

¶ Overall, I do not understand any concerns that people may have about their questions being compromised. I assume that this privilege will not be given to anyone that Bendrim don’t consider trustworthy, so it’s not much different from them doing it themselves as far as I’m concerned.

Once you get into controlled vocabulary, style sheets for terminology, and a thesaurus for terms of equivalence, you do have a whole other major project on your hands. It’s not a trivial undertaking, and the skills to do it are not in Everyman’s skill set.

@timtrueman of you are planning no name, sounds like you are planning an “all-registered-user” capability to add to tags. If it is to be wide and basic—please get rid of the capital letters—mimicking existing and having style guides for certain tags sounds like a royal pain in the ass. And can it be automated so caps are not recognized when typed?

@bob_ In the specific case of god/God, I think both should be accepted, depending on the asker’s intention.

@timtrueman phew! I am glad to hear there will be no editing of the posts themselves. I think it sounds like a good idea. I would think though that it might cause some hurt feelings and give certain people a sense they are being picked on. Some however, would probably welcome the idea because better tags equal a more widely read question.

@augustlan I disagree for the better good of the basic usability if the tag system. If the system reads “God” and “god” differently, it will create two completely different tags. Letting loose a flock of unschooled taxonomists on the Fluther archive as well as new Qs has problems enough [although many will not bother with it or care] without creating political nuances with capitalization. What next, get picky GMS15 style about president or President or a flurry of Ebay, eBay, ebay, drowning an already overtaxed system?

@anartist, that’s just the kind of thing I was talking about.

I’m liking this idea. And perhaps the guidelines could be changed to tell users not to use the tags for humor, of which, I ,too, am guilty. I’m not concerned with having the integrity of my questions compromised if a hard working volunteer wants to see that my question gets into the right hands. I would be thankful.

@rangerr @breedmitch I’d suggest a compromise: questions in General should not include “funny” topics, questions in Social could. This is also a social site, so people should be able to, you know, socialize.

I agree with @bob_ – and now I’m trying to be funny.

@zenele Oh SNAP! Touché.

@anartist I agree, overall, with what you’re saying. But in the specific case of god/God, I still think it would be wise to include both as legitimate topics, because they do mean different things.

On the other hand, you can see “God” as a special case of “god,” in which case one topic could cover both concepts, could it not?

You do have a point. Lower case ‘g’ it is.

Eliminating even the ability to choose capitals and have them read as capitals could halve the number of tag entries in the system—but some people will forget and do it anyway—Is it possible for this to be automated? Whatever the person types, it will convert to lower case?