Talk:Tag (metadata)

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    [edit] Questions

    As a relative newbie to folksonomies - tags, in particular - I'm wondering if there's a protocol, per se, for displaying the tag links in one's content. In a blog entry, for instance:

    • Where should the tags appear?
    • Is it kosher for them to be italicised?
    • Can they have delimiters other than spaces?
    • etc.

    The syntax rules for the tag links are necessary because computer programs need to identify them. Apart from the programmatic need, what should an author consider when displaying tags? What sort of leeway is reasonable if one prefers to display one's tags a little differently from the norm?

    --aslam 23:27, Apr 28, 2005 (UTC)


    --User:MLCarter1976 1331, 21-May-2008 (EST) I am just wondering where a relation to Tags and Keywords are. I'm new (obviously) and I don't want to cause trouble, or anything, I just wonder what the differences are between Tags and Keywords. I do I.T. for my company and to try to explain what a Tag is, well it's a Keyword..."why not use keyword then..." Hmm good idea. I don't know. I know that in some software programs I can "tag" things and others it is asking for, "any keywords you want to associate with this?" Thank you.

    Particularly in the context of software & search, I use "tag" and "keyword" as 100% interchangeable terms. The only substantive difference is that keyword is older & "tag" is au courant. It's like this.... EDP -> ADP -> MIS -> IT -> IS -> ?? If you're in IT, NEVER forget that you're in a fashion driven business. DEddy (talk) 02:48, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

    [edit] History

    It would be interesting to see some historical context here, where did the curent idea of tags first get show up? did it have the current UI as demonstrated in del.icio.us/gnome?

    I wonder this too. I do not recall tags existing (although I'm sure they did) until 2 years ago. Now they seem to be everywhere. What is the history of all this? Who tagged first? 128.211.202.189 04:23, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

    According to Using Del.icio.us in Education, the concept of tagging began with Joshua Schacter, creator of memepool, as a way of organizing that site's links. Cherdt (talk) 03:04, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

    No. At best, del.icio.us represents the first internet-based social tagging system. The concept of tagging itself has existed for quite some time. Mindmatrix 03:23, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

    Perhaps in the context of the web/Internet, but I'm sill using a Macintosh contact manager product that is dated 1987. One of its best features is the ability to place tags (e.g. {Industry=Air Transport}) so that contacts can be arranged in whatever meaningful piles I like. Extremely powerful concept. I assume this product (the vendor hit the bit bucket in 1994) was not the first to use the concept of "tagging." DEddy (talk) 03:28, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

    I'm biased because I work for del.icio.us, but as Joshua noted further down this page ("Tags and the HTML meta tag are unrelated..."), I believe he was the first to call it that and popularize it in the way that it's commonly understood now. There are plenty of earlier similar things (keywords, etc.), but as far I know they weren't called tagging and weren't quite the same. I also wouldn't equate social tagging with collaborative tagging, but that's a whole 'nother debate... Dreamyshade (talk) 09:24, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

    [edit] Metadata, tags, and meta tags

    Should tags and meta tags be covered in two different articles? And how do these two articles relate to the one on metadata? Seems to me a meta tag is a type of tag. This article - on tags - seems to be solely concerned with meta tags in the electronic environment. Tags in general also exist in the real world, e.g. tagging young offenders, graffiti, brand labels etc...

    I think we need to merge these articles or make the connections more explicit and clear. Any thoughts? NickW 11:54, 23 September 2005 (UTC)

    Delicious seemed to popularize it, but I believe the first site to have a major tagging system was livejournal, even though they weren't called "tags". They were groups that users entered simply as freetext, and could use to find related interests.

    This article is valuable on its own, but it seems to be a description of one of the more wide-spread applications of metadata: on the web. The first sentence is a non-web-specific definition of metadata, and could easily exist in the metadata article, but every subsequent sentence describes various ways metadata has been applied in various web sites. Perfectly valid, but it's really an application, or perhaps an instantiation, of metadata. Moving from 'Tag' to 'Tag (metadata)' was a good start; maybe it would be even more accurate and helpful to move it again to 'Tag (metadata on the World Wide Web)'. Petershank 19:53, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

    Tags and the HTML meta tag are unrelated. Also, tags are a kind of metadata, but not the reverse. Anyway, so far as I know, I invented tagging for labeling and recall of things. A reference exists at http://web.archive.org/web/20020525043925/http://muxway.org/ as well (at least as far back as 2002,) that site being the predecessor to delicious. Perhaps someone would edit the page to reflect this? JoshuaSchachter 08:39, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

    [edit] Too many external links?

    Is it just me, or are there too many external links (Online services and their tagged objects) on this page, as opposed to real content? I think it would be a good idea to start sorting through these sites to leave only the ones that are most relevant to the article. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Vekron10 (talk • contribs) March 2006.

    You're absolutely right. In the interest of keeping this article free of fluff, I have removed the entire ==Online services and their tagged objects== section. It simply isn't needed, as there is a nice compact section of well-known example websites.
    If someone feels the external links to those 4 sites should be in an ==External links== section, he/she can create an EL section and move them there. Note that if such a section is created, it should not be repopulated with external links. Wikipedia is not a linkfarm. See WP:NOT & WP:EL. --AbsolutDan (talk) 02:34, 5 May 2006 (UTC)
    Is there any need for the exlinks in the "Example websites that use Tags" section? They all have internal links which (presumably) carry exlinks to the site in question on them. Percy Snoodle 15:43, 31 May 2006 (UTC)
    Nope, you're right, there's no need for 'em. I've removed them. --AbsolutDan (talk) 16:25, 31 May 2006 (UTC)

    I'd like to add a link to ma.gnolia -- doesn't it deserve as much mention as del.icio.us? --Bill.Albing 13:07, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

    That section is intended only to provide a few examples of websites that use tags. It may already have 1 too many as is (Eventful). I don't think we should start randomly adding sites that use tags, especially if they don't have WP articles of their own (ma.gnolia is just a redirect). --AbsolutDan (talk) 13:14, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

    [edit] Proposed move to "Tag (metadata)"

    "Tags" is too generic and gives absolutely no information to disambiguate. I propose a move to Tag (metadata). æ² ✆ 2006-07-27t19:22z

    I agree --AbsolutDan (talk) 23:25, 27 July 2006 (UTC)
    Done. --Amit 19:04, 17 September 2006 (UTC)

    [edit] Forum on Tagging

    If anybody is interested, there is a forum on tagging at http://blogoforum.com/tag/tagging . If somebody think it is helpful for others - please mention it in the article. I will not add the link since I'm actually creator of Blogoforum.

    Denis Krukovsky, author, Blogoforum

    [edit] This page is largely useless

    This page is largely useless as a guide for the uninitiated. The first sentence has some gobbledygook about "folksonomy", which if you navigate to, seems to be circularly defined in terms of tags. The first two paragraphs of "Tagging example" are completely obscure.

    Basically, aren't tags things like < p > and < / p > [without the extra spaces] --- i.e., codes for formatting, etc.? If I'm under a misconception here, well, that's because this article isn't helping.

    Someone with a knack for explaining technical matters to laypeople should basically start all over with this article. Tawagoto 12:52, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

    Thats a completely different type of (meaning of) tag. 69.31.174.216 23:32, 8 June 2007 (UTC)

    [edit] Popular article?

    This article is quite hard to read, and it is probably used/looked up quite a bit, so it is vital that we start cleaning this up ASAP. I'll start in with doing spelling/grammer checks

    If you would like me too, I can organise this page a bit to look like most articles on Wikipedia. If you guys don't like it, we can always revert back to how it was before; although personally I don't think it can get much worse. So, you should see some Spelling/Grammer corrections, and I'll be watching this article for if you think I should reorganise the article a bit.
    Cameron Erickson (Camxx) 04:55, 26 November 2006 (UTC)


    [edit] Self reference = BAD

    Another syntax for use within HTML is to use the attribute rel="tag" to indicate that the linked-to page acts as a tag for the current context. For example, to tag this page with 'folksonomy' you would add <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/folksonomy" rel="tag">folksonomy</a>.

    See Wikipedia:Avoid_self-references --Grimboy 20:09, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

    [edit] Tagging in Wikipedia

    Wikipedia could use tagging by adding the rel="tag" attribute to applicable internal links. See also Wikipedia:WikiProject Microformats#MediaWiki issues. Andy Mabbett 09:02, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

    [edit] Largely Original Research

    This article is almost entirely original research. There are no citations save except for the statement about ambiguity between singular and plural tags. We need references! ~MDD4696 02:45, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

    [edit] broken external link

    One of the external links "A cognitive analysis of tagging. by Rashmi Sinha, September 27, 2005" appears to be down... Other web pages that mention it speak highly of it so it doesn't seem that it should be outright removed; maybe a link to the Google cache instead? —alxndr (t) 18:14, 13 May 2008 (UTC)