Comments on: Remembering Retrotagging

Remembering Retrotagging

grateful — Tue, 22 May 2007 10:46:14 -0800

What ever became of the idea to retrotag older posts? There seemed to be a consensus in this thread, but it aged out before any decision was made.

By: Krrrlson

Krrrlson — Tue, 22 May 2007 10:49:59 -0800

quonsar

By: grateful

grateful — Tue, 22 May 2007 10:55:59 -0800

IIRC, the quonsar tag fiasco happened before the linked thread.

By: Jofus

Jofus — Tue, 22 May 2007 10:59:38 -0800

I formally volunteer [an amount to be determined by the usual bun-fight] of my time towards this cause.

By: cortex

cortex — Tue, 22 May 2007 11:00:15 -0800

pb has been doing a little work on the tagging stuff—we've got a couple more admin tools for locating untagged posts and such—but I'm not sure what if any additional current or planned tag stuff is on the docket right now.

By: Doofus Magoo

Doofus Magoo — Tue, 22 May 2007 11:01:25 -0800

What exactly is "the quonsar tag fiasco," other than a fantastic name for a band?

By: jessamyn

jessamyn — Tue, 22 May 2007 11:07:02 -0800

I'd love to find a way to get a small posse of trusted tag volunteers to go back and, using the admin tool we have, tag old posts. I'm not sure how the permissions would need work on that, but I'd lead the project.

By: smackfu

smackfu — Tue, 22 May 2007 11:11:46 -0800

Quonsar tag fiasco

By: tristeza

tristeza — Tue, 22 May 2007 11:17:53 -0800

I'd volunteer for the posse.

By: blue_beetle

blue_beetle — Tue, 22 May 2007 11:25:47 -0800

TAG! UR IT!

By: Stynxno

Stynxno — Tue, 22 May 2007 11:35:55 -0800

free quonsar

By: Ambrosia Voyeur

Ambrosia Voyeur — Tue, 22 May 2007 11:40:55 -0800

What about a somewhat formalized volunteer process? Just something annoying enough to eliminate all but the serious archivist?

By: Plutor

Plutor — Tue, 22 May 2007 11:44:20 -0800

I reiterate my dissatisfaction with restricted tagging. It's only a half-assed folksonomy if I can't add a "redux" tag to every thread with the same topic is brought up a second time. There should be a tag cloud for every thread. If you like, tagging-semi-admins and the poster can be given triple-weight, and the poster's contacts double-weight. That might keep the heaviest tags more trustworthy. Or the tag cloud I see could only include those applied by my contacts and the semi-admins and the poster. (That would mess up discussions about searching and such, though.)

By: klangklangston

klangklangston — Tue, 22 May 2007 11:46:38 -0800

Well, does that mean we're going to have an established protocol and taxonomy, Jess? I mean, I think I tend toward overtagging, but I'd volunteer.

Does this mean MARC subject heading tags?

By: Jofus

Jofus — Tue, 22 May 2007 11:51:58 -0800

Re-reading this thread only underlined to me how civil and tolerant we've become over the past couple of years. How nice.

By: hoverboards don't work on water

hoverboards don't work on water — Tue, 22 May 2007 11:55:00 -0800

I think there are quite enough obsessives in this community to have every post tagged in short order, but is it going to happen if you have to manually vet members for trustworthiness?

The industrial-strength scalable solution is community tagging: a separate list of tags below the tags entered by the original poster. Proposed rules:

1. Anyone can tag any post with any tag.

2. Only tags entered more than once are displayed.

3. The complete list of tags, along with tagger, is viewable elsewhere.

#2 is an attempt to stop the community tag list being polluted by spurious noise taggers.

#3 is an attempt to spot troublemakers anyway.

By: smackfu

smackfu — Tue, 22 May 2007 11:58:48 -0800

When people can have multiple accounts, forcing two people to tag something isn't quite the safeguard you would hope for.

By: robocop is bleeding

robocop is bleeding — Tue, 22 May 2007 11:59:56 -0800

I went kinda nuts about this before, back before I embraced the term "tag" and insisted on using "keyword."

Authority Control, away!

By: Stynxno

Stynxno — Tue, 22 May 2007 12:04:18 -0800

Re-reading this thread only underlined to me how civil and tolerant we've become over the past couple of years. How nice.

oh man. i remember that. good times.

By: hoverboards don't work on water

hoverboards don't work on water — Tue, 22 May 2007 12:04:39 -0800

Abusing multiple accounts to get your pet tag listed would be pretty obvious if it ever got out of hand. Either the tags in question are reasonable, in which case there's no problem, or the tags are unreasonable, and it's always the same pair(s) of users.

By: serazin

serazin — Tue, 22 May 2007 13:24:51 -0800

Yay for retroactive tagging! It would also be a step in solving my pet issue with askme, which, incidentally, I think could benefit by being organized along the lines of this site.

By: vacapinta

vacapinta — Tue, 22 May 2007 13:27:02 -0800

I agree with Plutor. Let everybody tag but then only show the N most popular tags for that thread.

I'm usually a fan of Jessamyn but the "batshitinsane tag fiasco" sort of convinced me that librarians don't really understand folksonomies and their underlying principle. Its a taxonomy that embraces error in return for results that are not exact but rather "good enough."

That is, if I want to find X and only X then I need to go with an exact taxonomy ("I dont want any book about whales, I want Moby Dick!") but if I just want many threads on Boston without any guarantee I'm going to get every single one or that some might be about the rock band, then I go with folskonomy, because all I want is "good enough."

By: blue_beetle

blue_beetle — Tue, 22 May 2007 13:43:06 -0800

Tagging by commitee? Yeah, commitees usually produce the greatest works of art, the most inspired commentary, and the best quality work possible.

By: jessamyn

jessamyn — Tue, 22 May 2007 13:57:39 -0800

I'm usually a fan of Jessamyn but the "batshitinsane tag fiasco" sort of convinced me that librarians don't really understand folksonomies and their underlying principle.

Don't overgeneralize. Many librarians understand folksonomies and so do I. That whole so-called "fiasco" was a learning process while we figured out how we wanted tags to work on MetaFilter. I made a mistake, we corrected it, and to the best of my knowledge we haven't had a problem since.

By: dg

dg — Tue, 22 May 2007 13:59:31 -0800

There was a project quite some time ago to retrotag all AskMe threads - I think y6³ was behind it, but may be misremembering. I did volunteer and got a batch of threads allocated, then other parts of my life fell to pieces and I never completed it. I'm not sure how far it got in the end.

By: jessamyn

jessamyn — Tue, 22 May 2007 14:02:21 -0800

I think we're going to try it again with a tagging tool that will make it easier to at least get basic tags on the 30,000 or so threads that still need them. I'd like to open it up to anyone tagging anything, but we're going to move forward slowly with this while mathowie and pb are building things and cortex and I are pretty busy doing adminnish stuff. I have the old thread bookmarked, so I can im/email folks when we have a prototype of something up and running.

By: interrobang

interrobang — Tue, 22 May 2007 14:22:13 -0800

Good idea!

By: smackfu

smackfu — Tue, 22 May 2007 15:04:33 -0800

I made a mistake, we corrected it, and to the best of my knowledge we haven't had a problem since.

Good thing no one holds grudges on this thar internet.

By: jessamyn

jessamyn — Tue, 22 May 2007 15:06:39 -0800

I have a list of people who have volunteered to help in the past and I'll probably drop a note to the librarians that I know on MeFi. Anyone else who didn't offer in the previous thread or already in this thread, please drop a comment here or send me an email.

By: initapplette

initapplette — Tue, 22 May 2007 15:44:56 -0800

I'd like to help.

By: whir

whir — Tue, 22 May 2007 16:00:20 -0800

commitees usually produce the greatest works of art, the most inspired commentary, and the best quality work possible.

Point taken, but they do seem to be fairly good at organizing things.

By: jessamyn

jessamyn — Tue, 22 May 2007 16:40:40 -0800

OK, I sent out an email to about 20 people to start with to get at least started. If you want to help, drop me an email (or IM, better yet) and I'll get you set up.

By: carsonb

carsonb — Tue, 22 May 2007 17:14:56 -0800

O god. Dare I tag a MiguelCardoso post?

By: carsonb

carsonb — Tue, 22 May 2007 17:29:29 -0800

This is an interesting opportunity to do something about old posts with broken links. (What we'd do, I have no clue.) Would it be appropriate to ad a BrokenLink tag to them? anastasiav is with me, I see.

By: jessamyn

jessamyn — Tue, 22 May 2007 17:41:59 -0800

Unles you're really hurting for something to do, I'd say just skim the posts and try to tag appropriately. I know that I haven't been following any links unless I really truly can't figure out what a post is about.

By: jessamyn

jessamyn — Tue, 22 May 2007 19:24:00 -0800

We've done 1% of the 42,000 post tagging backlog in just a few hours. This will wendell.

By: LobsterMitten

LobsterMitten — Tue, 22 May 2007 19:24:48 -0800

I've found a couple that I couldn't figure out, and the sites are now gone. So I've been hitting the wayback machine. It's a funny kind of exercise, tagging to make the content accessible, when the links are broken. :)

By: LobsterMitten

LobsterMitten — Tue, 22 May 2007 19:25:34 -0800

Go us - souvenir propeller beanies all around!

By: smackfu

smackfu — Tue, 22 May 2007 19:31:15 -0800

Are you using a "deadlink" tag?

By: jessamyn

jessamyn — Tue, 22 May 2007 19:32:30 -0800

I think people are using brokenlink, either way we can change them all to one or the other at the end of it.

By: smackfu

smackfu — Tue, 22 May 2007 19:35:25 -0800

Also, it would be fabulous if "MetaMetaData Phase 2" was to add titles to the roughly 15246 questions on Ask that were asked before titles were added. Would really improve the search results.

By: LobsterMitten

LobsterMitten — Tue, 22 May 2007 19:40:50 -0800

oops- i haven't been using any tag for dead links. Any way to get back the ones I've just done?

By: quonsar

quonsar — Tue, 22 May 2007 19:41:20 -0800

i'll do it.

By: The Deej

The Deej — Tue, 22 May 2007 20:50:37 -0800

I will volunteer, but I think the best method is to have one tag per volunteer. Mine: dermabrasion.

By: carsonb

carsonb — Tue, 22 May 2007 21:18:00 -0800

I feel sort of weird tagging a mathowie MetaFilter post too. I know he has a lot, but, um—aw, what the heck. Golly, if only ah knew the burden associated with this task beforehand...

By: smackfu

smackfu — Tue, 22 May 2007 21:18:01 -0800

Isn't that a famous saying? "When all you have is one tag, everything seems like it could be tagged with that."

By: Rhomboid

Rhomboid — Tue, 22 May 2007 21:35:18 -0800

So this secret longtagboat cabal has been formed and the calibration of the secret decoder rings has begun? Yay! More tags is good for everyone.

By: jessamyn

jessamyn — Tue, 22 May 2007 21:50:31 -0800

2%! pb also made up this super keen word-grabber predictamo thing that will make it even easier tomorrow. Stay tuned.

By: LobsterMitten

LobsterMitten — Tue, 22 May 2007 22:43:40 -0800

I suck at tagging the computer-tech AskMes. If I just leave them blank, will they go back in the pool? Or shall I just press on, tag them with whatever I can get from the question, and call it good enough?

By: jessamyn

jessamyn — Tue, 22 May 2007 22:45:15 -0800

they'll go back into the pool, you're fine.

By: Plutor

Plutor — Wed, 23 May 2007 05:55:44 -0800

Ugh. A committee of people with largely all of the same training and professional experience?

By: smackfu

smackfu — Wed, 23 May 2007 05:57:14 -0800

Dude, it's just adding tags.

By: The Deej

The Deej — Wed, 23 May 2007 06:23:44 -0800

Oh. Sure. "Just adding tags." And you-know-who was "just" a slightly unstable, mustached dictator!

By: jessamyn

jessamyn — Wed, 23 May 2007 06:34:04 -0800

Ugh. A committee of people with largely all of the same training and professional experience?

Actually they're mostly not librarians, the people who are helping.

MeFi: 32,814 untagged posts. | 749 tagged so far.
AskMeFi: 9,054 untagged posts. | 372 tagged so far.

By: Jofus

Jofus — Wed, 23 May 2007 06:39:59 -0800

I can confirm that I can't even spell liberian.

By: Plutor

Plutor — Wed, 23 May 2007 07:07:59 -0800

"The retrotagging committee is a bad closed system. I still don't see anything tagged with oppressiveinternetregime"
"Dude, it's just adding tags."

"I didn't want mayo on that."
"Dude, it's just a sandwich."

"Please don't spit on me."
"Dude, it's just saliva."

I'm not allowed to voice my opinion on things that are less important than life-or-death?

By: smackfu

smackfu — Wed, 23 May 2007 07:55:32 -0800

My position is more like:

"You didn't bake this bread yourself?"
"Dude, it's just a sandwich."

By: cortex

cortex — Wed, 23 May 2007 08:27:57 -0800

I'm not allowed to voice my opinion on things that are less important than life-or-death?

Nope. Which is why we've deleted all your comments on the subject from this thread, instead of totally leaving them alone while people responded conversationally to them. ?

By: Melinika

Melinika — Wed, 23 May 2007 12:37:24 -0800

I don't like that the tags I've used on my posts/questions show on my profile page. I just don't. It bugs. I had all my AskMeFi questions tagged but untagged them when that "feature" turned up so nothing would show. If people are going to go back and tag them again (and I agree it helps a lot with searching AskMeFi, don't get me wrong, this is just my personal picky-pick), could we get a way to turn off or override that "Top 10 Tags Used" thing on our profiles?

By: grateful

grateful — Wed, 23 May 2007 12:56:44 -0800

Melinika - that top 10 tag list has always bothered me, too -- it's almost like a big-brotherish drive-by profile. It is hard to argue that the picture the tags paint is unfair when you've tagged your own posts. But when somebody else choses the tags, I can understand your discomfort. Nonetheless, I strongly prefer the benefits of having all the posts tagged.

By: cortex

cortex — Wed, 23 May 2007 13:06:41 -0800

At the moment, tags added by other users would show up on the tagging user's profile page, not on that of the person whose post was tagged, so the only people directly affected currently are the volunteer taggers themselves.

By: quonsar

quonsar — Wed, 23 May 2007 13:26:39 -0800

CORTEX YOU DORK. WHEN DID YOU CHJANGE YOUR GMAIL ADDRESS. I'VE BEEN CORRESPONDING WITH A BLACK HOLE.

By: cortex

cortex — Wed, 23 May 2007 13:31:37 -0800

NO ITS STILL THE SAME IT JUST FORWARDS TO ANOTHER ACCOUNT AND I HAVEN'T WRITTEN BACK TO YOU YET SORRY FOR THE DELAY I STILL WANT TO DO THAT MUSIC THING

By: klangklangston

klangklangston — Wed, 23 May 2007 15:18:29 -0800

"I don't like that the tags I've used on my posts/questions show on my profile page. I just don't. It bugs. I had all my AskMeFi questions tagged but untagged them when that "feature" turned up so nothing would show."

I'm sorry, that's nuts. Why would you want to make things harder for other folks to find? I mean, fuck, if you're worried that folks will know that you like beach, sandles, bargain, you should get off of the internet.

By: Melinika

Melinika — Wed, 23 May 2007 16:38:58 -0800

I *don't* want to make things harder for other people to find, which is one reason I commented here with my opinion - I'm fine with tagging, and have tagged all my MeFi posts. I would be happy to tag my AskMeFi questions if the tags didn't show on my profile. Someone else picking the tags is even worse. AskMeFi is personal questions, not impersonal links to stuff, you know; what if you've asked *really* personal stuff and had "buttitching" or "viagra" or "poop" up there? You can't see how that might make someone a bit uncomfortable? It's not like you can't do one more click and see what questions I've posted so I don't see how not wanting the tags I've used right up on my profile makes it harder for people to find anything, seriously. Anyway - it's moot at the moment because as cortex pointed out, there's no tags on my profile that I haven't tagged myself, so that's fine. However, that might change, and I have concerns about it, why not say so?

By: klangklangston

klangklangston — Wed, 23 May 2007 17:00:01 -0800

"AskMeFi is personal questions, not impersonal links to stuff, you know; what if you've asked *really* personal stuff and had "buttitching" or "viagra" or "poop" up there?"

Well, aside from the fact that my REALLY personal (or generally embarrassing) questions are asked anonymously, I still think that's mental. No one cares if your butt itches, and no one who knows you cares. The fundamental problem with embarrasment is it's far more often felt as part of unwarranted egocentrism.

But yeah, moot.

By: klangklangston

klangklangston — Wed, 23 May 2007 17:06:14 -0800

"The fundamental problem with embarrasment is it's far more often felt as part of unwarranted egocentrism."

As in, no one cares about my itchy ass.

By: smackfu

smackfu — Wed, 23 May 2007 17:08:13 -0800

The ironic problem with embarassment is that mentioning you suffer from it gets you more attention than if you had said nothing. How many people checked out Melinika's posts to see what the bad tags could have been?

By: Melinika

Melinika — Wed, 23 May 2007 18:17:46 -0800

You may not care, but other people might. Especially if you have almost no info on your profile.

I don't suffer embarrassment - I was using it as an example - and it is a valid point. Enjoy my questions about zits, makeup, and taxes.

By: cortex

cortex — Wed, 23 May 2007 19:39:30 -0800

However, that might change, and I have concerns about it, why not say so?

To clarify further, that really, really isn't likely to change. The only thing likely to change is the possibility of an exclusion for the volunteer tagging squad, that will hide tags on their profile page for posts other than their own.

That doesn't address your basic objection to your tags being displayed on your page, Melinika, but I wanted to be clear on the point.

It's possible Matt would consider adding a "hide my tag cloud" option on a per-user basis. Drop him an email, perhaps.

By: Melinika

Melinika — Wed, 23 May 2007 20:15:43 -0800

Thanks, cortex, I appreciate the clarification.

By: jessamyn

jessamyn — Wed, 23 May 2007 20:47:46 -0800

MeFi: 32,661 untagged posts. | 902 tagged so far.
AskMeFi: 8,946 untagged posts. | 480 tagged so far

Anyone still wanting to help, IM or email me with your usernumber.

By: tellurian

tellurian — Thu, 24 May 2007 00:38:57 -0800

I just got these three Asks - 1, 2, 3 in my tagging queue. I perused the comments on all three to get a better sense of the tags to apply. 1 and 2 had a comment from the originator saying 'thanks that's it'. The third was clearly answered correctly. None of them had a 'best answer tick'. I tagged them with answered. I want to ask before I refill my queue - should I stop doing that, is there any point?

By: carsonb

carsonb — Thu, 24 May 2007 02:35:34 -0800

I tagged them with answered....is there any point?

When I have a question for AskMe and go searching for previous similar questions, all that matters to me is finding relevant threads. An 'answered' tag doesn't help to find topical questions. Reading the thread should remain the best way to decide a question answered or not, from a reference perspective, and adding a tag to that effect is redundant. Remember, 'best answer tick' dnne best answer.

Anyway, it could be considered editorializing.

By: jessamyn

jessamyn — Thu, 24 May 2007 05:41:38 -0800

should I stop doing that, is there any point?

You should stop doing that. No one else is doing that. In fact, I'd say if you are going and reading the threads, you may be overthinking this. The tags are going on the question itself [or the post, in MeFi] and not generally in the entire thread experience.

By: grateful

grateful — Thu, 24 May 2007 06:31:08 -0800

In fact, I'd say if you are going and reading the threads, you may be overthinking this. The tags are going on the question itself...

I disagree. Here's an example where the tag is correctly derived from the answer - not the question.

By: jessamyn

jessamyn — Thu, 24 May 2007 07:44:21 -0800

I disagree. Here's an example where the tag is correctly derived from the answer - not the question.

Once in a while that's a great solution, and more tags on something is rarely a bad idea, but generally for this project we don't want people to have to read the whole thread. When people post a question, they don't know the answer already. Really conscientious people may go back and add the answer to a question in the tags if it's relevant, but I'd still say it's more than we'd expect for this round of the tagging project.

By: tellurian

tellurian — Thu, 24 May 2007 15:42:33 -0800

Okay, will do. No more answered.

By: jessamyn

jessamyn — Fri, 25 May 2007 07:44:58 -0800

We're at 6% or so right now. If we keep going more or less like this we can finish up within the month. Again anyone who would like to help out, please let me know.

By: fallenposters

fallenposters — Fri, 25 May 2007 09:59:41 -0800

Hey I'll join up, its not like I've got any good ideas for FPPs. :)

By: gwint

gwint — Fri, 25 May 2007 10:38:01 -0800

I wonder if there's a good single tag for those AskMe questions about "you know that song/movie/book that goes lalala"? I'm getting a ton of those.

By: goodnewsfortheinsane

goodnewsfortheinsane — Fri, 25 May 2007 13:35:47 -0800

namethatsong + namethissong
namethatbook + namethisbook

etc.

By: hindmost

hindmost — Fri, 25 May 2007 15:10:01 -0800

AskMeFi is personal questions, not impersonal links to stuff, you know; what if you've asked *really* personal stuff and had "buttitching" or "viagra" or "poop" up there? You can't see how that might make someone a bit uncomfortable?

Speaking as someone whose top tags once included "artificial_vagina", "electroejaculation" and "rectal_leech" all at the same time...you get used to it.

Plus you get invited to some really wild parties

By: Malor

Malor — Fri, 25 May 2007 15:39:23 -0800

Tagging without snarking is harder than it sounds. I so wanted to add 'crassexploitation' in one case.... :)

By: Tuwa

Tuwa — Fri, 25 May 2007 21:24:42 -0800

'Blatantlies' was one that tempted me. Best not to add it....

By: jessamyn

jessamyn — Mon, 28 May 2007 08:17:32 -0800

For anyone who is still following this post, we're over the 10% mark for the 43000 untagged posts that we started with. Thanks so much to everyone for helping out.

By: psmealey

psmealey — Mon, 28 May 2007 10:44:29 -0800

I'll help but only if everyone can go back to my wittier and more carefree comments of the 2002-2004 era and start favoriting them.

By: redteam

redteam — Thu, 31 May 2007 03:14:55 -0800

I would just like to mention that I'm getting a real Mormon vibe off of this retrotagging stuff.

By: jessamyn

jessamyn — Thu, 31 May 2007 04:19:34 -0800

Mefi: 25,939 untagged posts. (7,624 so far.)
Ask: 5,409 untagged posts. (4,017 so far.)

27%!

By: jessamyn

jessamyn — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 21:57:58 -0800

30%! you guys totally fucking rock!

By: Ogre Lawless

Ogre Lawless — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 09:58:01 -0800

Made a mistake? Click on the line containing the tags and you can re-edit them.

Well, damnit, I did make a mistake (an omission of yon "brokenlinks" actually) and I couldn't make this go in Firefox :(

By: Ogre Lawless

Ogre Lawless — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 09:59:44 -0800

Ah crap, nevermind. Now that I've gone back to the page it works as advertised.