Tag splitting

First of all, let me admit I have no idea if this is at all doable.

BUT, if so, please give us some way to split tags - much like we can split authors now. It would get rid of all sorts of ambiguities. Some examples: "Beer" means bear in Dutch - not the beverage, "Theo van Gogh" may refer to Vincent's brother or to his descendant (a Dutch filmmaker, murdered by an Islamist extremist), and in European usage "football" refers to what Americans call soccer. I'm sure there are many more examples.

This would also get rid of many of the problems we run into with tag combining.

It would be the perfect union between tagging and controlled vocabulary.

Beer is sure a troublesome liquor for combiners. The Germans think it's oil... So yes, this would really be nice, if it was somehow possible. I don't quite see what one should do with tags as "Roman": English nonfiction is one thing, most of the novels are another, but what to do with the historical fiction?

Eh, no, it's Öl that can mean either oil (in German) or beer (in Scandinavian languages) - which, of course, simply proves that Öl should ideally be split too.

Yeah, sure, there would rise some problematic cases where you wouldn't be sure if "Roman" means "novel" or "something having to do with Rome". In author splitting we would deal with similar cases as "unknown" (or something like that). Of course it should never break connectivity - any user clicking that tag should still always see all of his/her tags.

Eh, no, it's Öl that can mean either oil (in German) or beer (in Scandinavian languages)
I think that is exactly what andejons means.

It's an interesting idea. Though not trivial, I think we could work through splitting into meanings a, b, c, unknown.

My biggest concern is scale. There can be several orders of magnitude more works per tag than works per author. I also suspect that the number of distinct tags is far larger than the number of authors. The task may simply be too big.

It should be coupled with the ability of each tag user to specify which meaning each of their tags represents. But I have little hope that more than a few would actually do that.

Come to think of it, it shouldn't be the works that are split among the tags but the users of that tag. On the tag split page you'd have the id's of users and you'd take each of the users in unknown and decide from how they tag what they mean when they're using that tag is. Of course that user could also specify what the meaning of their tag is as well. There are a lot less users that use tags then works so it shouldn't be as much work.

Hmmm, if I could put a meaning on my tag it would be useful - there are places where I want to use the same word but I mean two different things (right now, for instance, I'm tagging Historical for historical fiction and Romance:Historical for historical romance - love to be able to tag both of them Historical and distinguish between the two). But now we're coming back to the old request for hierarchical tags, from a new direction...

No, this isn't the same as hierarchical tags, it's a way to distinguish tags that are spelled the same but have different meanings. And having a single user using a single tag in two different ways certainly breaks my model of how this should work.

ok...I be quiet now...

:)

In my opinion tags are a big mess in either way.

There are at least two types of tags.
General Tags (history, fiction, WW1, WW2; ...)
and private Tags (hardcover, kids, 1st floor, ...)

I would likte them being separeted.

BTW: Wrong topic?

Yeah, I guess that's another form of tag splitting. Never mind though.

"In my opinion tags are a big mess in either way.

There are at least two types of tags.
General Tags (history, fiction, WW1, WW2; ...)
and private Tags (hardcover, kids, 1st floor, ...)

I would likte them being separeted.

BTW: Wrong topic?"

I apologize for necro-ing the topic, but...

Private tags would be wonderful. I used a custom tag to differentiate between which textile references I actually own and which ones are just on my wishlist or have been rehomed (and I use said tag to generate lists of them). It makes my heart sink a bit to see my ownership tag listed outside of my profile/library... But since most of the widgets, etc. use tags and I wouldn't want to make hundreds of collections anyway, I don't really have much choice...

I honestly thought that tags were private until I saw mine cropping up outside my library... Considering that some of my tags are just my personal opinion (i.e., the over-rated tag for lauded classics I found horrible) it's a bit... undesirable for them to be appearing elsewhere. While I'm apparently not the only one who does it (and most of the books tagged therewith really do deserve it) it's still not really a "proper" topic tag for book contents...

I was about to tag a stack of books someone wanted to borrow from me 'Lent' when I realized I already use that for the period of the church year leading up to Easter. Ooops.

Oops indeed ;-) Maybe "allowed to be borrowed" would serve your purpose.

Tag splitting would also be helpful for tag translating. Now I have to create monsters for tags like "Queens", because that's mostly about royalty but sometimes about the part of New York.

I definitely see how this would be an advantageous feature.

Horse hockey! 'Lent' may be the 40 days leading up to Easter/Zombie Jesus Long Weekend, but it is also the simple past tense and past participle of 'to lend'.

Please tag as you see fit.

Of course everybody should tag as they see fit. I don't think anybody is arguing against that. It's just that it would be useful to be able to distinguish between various meanings.

FWIW, I precede the "mechanical" tags - the "private" ones, which are not descriptive of the subject matter of the book - with an @ sign. This doesn't interfere with any of the functions tags interact with, and makes them sort together in my tag list. I believe quite a few other members do this too.

Yes - though you have to be careful which signs you use. Some of them cause problems with search, clicking on them, or the tag page. ~, _, @, and ! work (among others); ?, slash, backslash, > and < are problematic.

The other advantage of using a mark is that it makes the tag unique so it drops to the bottom of the general list - tags that are used more often rise to the top of the tag list for a book, so making one that no one else uses makes it show less (on any but books where you're the only owner, they're likely to be behind the See All link).

21: They're unique until some tag combiner decides that @library and library are really the same thing and gets enough people to agree that they get combined. Why anyone thinks aggregating private tags is useful to the site I have no idea.

I don't think we can combine tags and members just yet ;-)

> 23

Maybe that should be an RSI.

Oops. The first library had an at sign before it.

I figured. But "@" before a word/phrase turns it into a touchstone for a user.

Yeah, just kidding around - nothing new there, at least, not as far as I'm concerned.