Comments on: Backtagging Update

Backtagging Update

jessamyn — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 18:44:00 -0800

Just a quick note on what's going on with the backtagging project and some "go go go!" momentum for a final push to the finish.

So, right now ALL the AskMe posts have been tagged, over 9400. Of the 33,000+ MeFi posts we started with, there are a little under 6800 left. Fifteen percent, people! We've got somewhere between 35 and 50 backtaggers working, but there's been a definite slowdown since holidaytime. So, anyone who is interested in adding tags to old posts, drop me an email [jessamyn at the gmail, NOT a MeFiMail for this, if you don't mind] and anyone who has already been participating, feel free to drop on by and add a few tags this week or next. Thanks to everyone for helping out and special hopefully non-embarassing thanks to CKmtl who has not only tagged more posts than anyone else but who has also been catching old typoed tags so we've been able to fix some of those as we go.

By: klangklangston

klangklangston — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 18:51:46 -0800

Oh, yeah, I meant to get back to that.

Of all I coulda gotten from my Catholic progenitors, their work ethic seems to be it.

By: CKmtl

CKmtl — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 19:01:26 -0800

Heh, not embarrassing.

But yeah, my dear fellow backtaggers, about the typos... the added tags aren't set in stone (from your end) until you've left the page or clicked the 'Give Me More' button - you can edit them by clicking on the blue entry line. A quick scan for typos before leaving the page would be great, since 'msuci' and 'fsxjsn' (or something similar that someone's cat tried to enter as 'fascism') doesn't help much to organize things.

By: klangklangston

klangklangston — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 19:22:42 -0800

There. That's like three pages of 'em I just did. Now it's off to utilize my ADD for some other good!

By: ooga_booga

ooga_booga — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 19:38:33 -0800

Backtagging? Is that what the kids are calling it these days?

By: Razzle Bathbone

Razzle Bathbone — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 19:49:33 -0800

Crap, totally forgot to get back to that.

Well off to add the Idon'tknowhowmany BUSH tags I have done

By: The Deej

The Deej — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 20:20:03 -0800

Huh. I totally thought we were totally done. Totally. Oh my.

By: ThePinkSuperhero

ThePinkSuperhero — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 20:31:06 -0800

Could the link to the tagging page be provided? I cannot find it.

By: jessamyn

jessamyn — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 20:39:22 -0800

TPS, IM me or I'll email it to you. I'd link it here but unless you're a backtagger it's just a blocked page which is sort of annoying to folks, I think.

By: mumkin

mumkin — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 21:22:43 -0800

the added tags aren't set in stone (from your end) until you've left the page or clicked the 'Give Me More' button - you can edit them by clicking on the blue entry line.

Not entirely true if you're using Safari... there's some weirdness with re-editing, such that if you click on a tag you have provided (to see if it's currently in use, what extant tags cluster around it that might be valid for the post at hand, etc), you are unable to edit already submitted tags until you submit another post's tags. Crikey, does that make sense? I'm not complaining; it's the charming quirkiness of an ad hoc solution. (The js looks to have been repurposed from pb's OTFG project for image-tagging)

Just as a point of interest, how many of us are throwing some back? When I'm faced with one that I just don't feel particularly capable of tagging well, for whatever reason, I've been skipping it. Maybe 1 in 20 or so. I'm wondering how likely it is that as we're approaching the bottom of the randomized barrel, the posts will in fact be bottom of the barrel posts that no one's felt like tagging.

By: marxchivist

marxchivist — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 21:38:33 -0800

I've been slack with this, just knocked out a few. And yeah, I've thrown a few back. Usually overly tech related things I don't know much about. I'm glad this is getting done. If I can help bring a small bit of order to the chaotic maelstrom of the internet, I can sleep a little better.

By: Blazecock Pileon

Blazecock Pileon — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 21:52:14 -0800

Finishing the two or three thousand AskMes was easy because I could strip tags from the content of the question. Often, similar questions could easily use the same set of tags.

The Metafilter threads are harder to tag, because I found that, 4 out of 5 times (or, often, with worse odds), the links or main link would be dead. In the interests of accurate tagging I focused on the AskMes, instead.

What may help is for someone within the Metafilter programming circle to write up a quick script that tests for 404 or other errors from visiting links in whatever tagless threads remain, adding a "dead" tag to them and letting the community focus on doing the rest properly.

Without live links, tagging a dead article seems pointless, if not inaccurate.

By: mediareport

mediareport — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 22:21:05 -0800

adding a "dead" tag

Aren't we using the "brokenlink" tag for posts where the main link is dead? Automating it would have been nice, sure, but we're almost done at this point.

By: Rumple

Rumple — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 22:43:54 -0800

whoops, Ive been using deadlink for dead links

Also, whenever it happened, thanks for making the backtags not show in my user tags.

By: donnagirl

donnagirl — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 23:48:59 -0800

Sometimes tagging a post with a broken link is pointless, but many more times the discussion makes it worthwhile, especially in the pre-AskMe days when plenty of "hey, anyone know about this thing" posts passed front page muster.

Backtagging is fun, especially when you get gifted with little glimpses of mefi history amongst all the broken link newsfilter.

By: mumkin

mumkin — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 01:08:35 -0800

Yeah. If there's any merit/meat at all to the discussion on a post with a broken main link, I try to research the topic enough that I can tag it as though the link still worked. Eventually linkrot will affect most posts, but the threads themselves are eternal. Actually, I tend to read-up on most of the links that work, too. It makes me terribly slow, but hopefully I'm tagging as well as the OP would have done, who was presumably familiar with the subject matter. It's a very satisfying undertaking, taking a purposeful, deep, random stroll through the archives.

When all of this is over, I hope it will be possible to generate a cloud of the tags I've applied. I feel like I've been playing a very long, very large word-association game, with a few thousand metafilter posts as my Rorschach tests. There may be something self-revealing in the controlled vocabulary I've generated in response to all this MeFiness, and I'd like to see it. I mean, Election2004, GeorgeWBush, 911, brokenlink, terrorism, NewYorkTimes and IraqWar aside, of course.

By: cashman

cashman — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 04:39:45 -0800

I did a few last week, and seconding the thanks for not having it show up in our user tags.

By: flapjax at midnite

flapjax at midnite — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 04:55:01 -0800

Guten Tag!

By: The Deej

The Deej — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 05:04:44 -0800

I doed a page!!! Glad I came back to check about brokenlink. I didn't use that tag, but with over 6,000 instances, it looks like I should be.

By: Abiezer

Abiezer — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 05:46:09 -0800

Not for the first time in my life, I look on from the shiftless crowd of unworthy passengers as the more civic-minded citizenry discuss their sterling efforts for the common good. There's a mild twinge of guilt, but the pubs'll be open in half an hour.

By: jessamyn

jessamyn — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 06:53:22 -0800

We've also got an admin-facing find/replace tool so if you see weird busted tags or typoed tags [especially if they're rampant across a few posts] you can MeMail them to me with a link and I can go in and fix them. Thanks for the extra effort, we've done about 400 more since last night.

By: OmieWise

OmieWise — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 07:04:29 -0800

I totally forgot about this, but I've rededicated myself.

By: jessamyn

jessamyn — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 07:32:18 -0800

I've rededicated myself.

Every time I read this, I think it says "redacted"

By: CKmtl

CKmtl — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 07:53:06 -0800

The Metafilter threads are harder to tag, because I found that, 4 out of 5 times (or, often, with worse odds), the links or main link would be dead.

Yeah, but in most cases it's still possible to get the gist of what was posted from either the text of the post or the comments. My tagging philosophy has been that it's not strictly necessary to tag with the exact minutiae of the post; broader categories will do.

Like a brokenlink post about about the RIAA and Napster doesn't need to be tagged with the name of the judge and lawyers involved. RIAA, Napster, music, piracy, p2p, filesharing, copyright, etc... should do nicely if someone wants to browse through archives of Napster-related posts.

When the text of the post is "Hey, check this out!", the url doesn't hint at any topic, and there's either no comments or really vague ones... then, yeah, not much to do other than slap a lonely brokenlink on it.

By: OmieWise

OmieWise — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 08:55:19 -0800

~~I totally forgot about this, but I've rededicated myself.~~

I've redacted myself.

By: blue_beetle

blue_beetle — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 11:38:09 -0800

I just use "bronkenlink" myself. It makes more sense.

By: paduasoy

paduasoy — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 11:43:34 -0800

I'll have another go. Got a bit frustrated by US politics posts, trying to work out who was republican or democrat.

By: agregoli

agregoli — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 12:38:33 -0800

Whew! Been tagging all day. It's satisfying to see the number untagged go down though.

By: marxchivist

marxchivist — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 15:35:51 -0800

Anyone come up with any tags for this thing?

Gotta go now. kthxby

By: Razzle Bathbone

Razzle Bathbone — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 16:39:06 -0800

I did a batch last night while on the reference desk (and will be doing some more in a bit) so it is sort of work related. Its funny how many 'hey check this out' posts #1 used to make. Now they all go to various dead pages.

By: jessamyn

jessamyn — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 16:58:35 -0800

Without this project I would never know what the Modern Humorist's 404 page looked like. Only 5400 left. Go team go!

By: tellurian

tellurian — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 18:20:35 -0800

Marxchivist - I have two tags for you AWE SOME

By: CKmtl

CKmtl — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 18:32:35 -0800

...

Without this project I would have never known that Fabio, Prince, and Criss Angel traveled back in time and had an illegitimate man-on-man-on-man lovechild.

By: tellurian

tellurian — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 18:33:38 -0800

And hey, jessamyn, wandering around the hair links in the SunGodsUniverse post I got a 404 too.

By: cortex

cortex — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 18:36:59 -0800

I feel I should backtag more. But not so much that I'm actually going to right now.

By: Rumple

Rumple — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 21:30:19 -0800

Fucking yahoo news, Would it have been so hard to have some kind of persistent URL archive thingie? Idiots.

By: salvia

salvia — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 21:40:40 -0800

Wow, down to 5098 now! (And lessee... I contributed like... 0.7% of that improvement! And now I have to get back to packing.)

By: nkknkk

nkknkk — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 22:43:42 -0800

Looks like we're moments from crossing the <5000 mark!

By: nkknkk

nkknkk — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 22:52:06 -0800

... and I just got to add the following tags to a post: pimps interviews sanfrancisco california. Who says backtagging doesn't have its moments?

By: paduasoy

paduasoy — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 04:07:12 -0800

AARGH bloody WebSense.

By: jessamyn

jessamyn — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 07:29:22 -0800

4,782 untagged posts left. It's amazing to me how many big news outlets have links that are just dead with no "try our archives" or anything else. But I guess I'm equally amazed at seven year old links that still work. Finding old untagged posts from when mathowie provided like 75-100% of the content are like little gems in here. This one predicts the as-yet-unbuilt MetaTalk.

By: cortex

cortex — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 07:39:27 -0800

It also predicts a web-design/programming AskMe, sort of.

Metafilter: although posting naked while standing on one's head is not necessarily required by this site, it's greatly encouraged.

By: gleuschk

gleuschk — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 09:02:06 -0800

Man o man, would I like to see the redesign mockups Matt posted. Powder blue! Yellow!

By: johnofjack

johnofjack — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 14:46:54 -0800

Yay! We're under 4500 untagged now.

By: jessamyn

jessamyn — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 18:39:03 -0800

Hey we're at 3999. Go go go!

By: donnagirl

donnagirl — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 21:17:10 -0800

Just under 3500. We got almost half of what was left in just over a week! Maybe we could do half of what's there now by next week, and then half of those in the following week, and then, oh god, we've somehow activated one of Zeno's paradoxes, right, and we'll always do half and never get done.

By: johnofjack

johnofjack — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 22:34:56 -0800

Under 3,000 now.

By: Rumple

Rumple — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 23:23:55 -0800

heh

By: CKmtl

CKmtl — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 14:07:52 -0800

Then and Now.

By: nkknkk

nkknkk — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 09:45:08 -0800

Down to 2800. I bet we could finish by April Fools Day, whaddya say?

By: jessamyn

jessamyn — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 10:15:43 -0800

You guys are amazing.

By: CKmtl

CKmtl — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 15:42:10 -0800

I really love these old OMGNEWTECH! ones.

By: johnofjack

johnofjack — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 08:42:13 -0800

7513 posts tagged with brokenlink.

Ephemera, thy name is internet.

By: donnagirl

donnagirl — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 12:39:22 -0800

There used to be a lot of links to random ebay auctions. Here, we seem to be astonished that someone would try and sell USED SHOES there. So, so naive.

By: nkknkk

nkknkk — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 17:11:09 -0800

Holy crap, <2000. We're rockin' and rollin' now!

By: donnagirl

donnagirl — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 18:54:35 -0800

Do we have a tag for "crashes my browser"? The main link in this post completely locked up my browser. I didn't get to tag it, because of the crash, but just curious in case I get it again. The few comments it got tend to say "it crashed my browser" too, so it's not just me.

By: CKmtl

CKmtl — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 19:23:28 -0800

Yeah, I've run into a handful that have crashed on me. As we start scrapping the bottom of the untagged barrel, I guess they'll start popping up more often because of the pre-tagging crashes.

I don't know if there's much use in tagging them as crashy. And we probably shouldn't mix up 'crash' and 'crashes' (as in, vehicle-goes-crunch) with browser crashes.

By: donnagirl

donnagirl — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 19:54:12 -0800

Yeah, I agree - and just plain "crash" wouldn't really warn anyone away in any case. I was thinking more of something similar to "brokenlink" - we're tagging those because of some potential future project, and an 'omgitcrashedmyfirefox' tag could be used in the same way, if we had a standard tag to use. But no huge deal either way.

By: CKmtl

CKmtl — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 20:05:25 -0800

Hmm, I don't know if cortex's magic can resurrect buggered websites like the crashy ones. If he can, sure, crashylink or something would be useful.

By: cortex

cortex — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 20:22:32 -0800

I'm not sure if there's a clearcut path to dealing with crashy sites; if folks want to throw "crashy" or "crashylink" onto 'em as fair warning, that seems fine (I agree that "crash" isn't good). Worst case it acts as a fuzzy warning, even if we can't really fix them.

And I'm not sure what we could do magic-wise about 'em, short of maybe redirecting to a cache somewhere if the cache managed somehow not to be crashy.

By: donnagirl

donnagirl — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 20:48:08 -0800

You mean there's no anti-crashy metafilter admin magic? But I thought you guys...but metafilter is...

Wow. At least I still have the easter bunny.

By: lauranesson

lauranesson — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 23:04:31 -0800

Oh, man, it's down to like 1800 - this could be done tomorrow with enough hardcores.

By: CKmtl

CKmtl — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 08:17:21 -0800

Between the two, I think 'crashylink' is better. It stands out more as a warning, and it's less ambiguous in meaning.

It'd be a bit of a bother, but maybe it would be a good idea to start jotting down the title or first few words of a crashy post. That way, when it pops back up in your random ten posts it won't catch you off guard.

By: CKmtl

CKmtl — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 17:38:25 -0800

Closing in on 1000! Three digits numbers, here we come.

By: donnagirl

donnagirl — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 21:11:16 -0800

999!

By: CKmtl

CKmtl — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 11:19:13 -0800

I've seen enough of these that curiosity is getting the better of me...

What's up with the greenspun extra URL stuff in a lot of baylink's early posts?

By: jessamyn

jessamyn — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 11:22:09 -0800

CKmti, can you give an example of a post that uses that convention?

By: CKmtl

CKmtl — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 11:42:27 -0800

The post itself and the first comment in it.

By: jessamyn

jessamyn — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 11:57:55 -0800

baylink is around, MeFiMail him. I have no idea.

By: mumkin

mumkin — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 13:16:20 -0800

Yeah, I've noticed that unfortunate redirect too. It's a bummer, because it warrants (and gets from me) a brokenlink tag, but if the user is astute enough to edit the url, the original site may still be serving up the intended content.

By: nkknkk

nkknkk — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 13:42:42 -0800

<750, people. WOW.

By: donnagirl

donnagirl — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 16:39:21 -0800

Is Matt still tired of playing html babysitter? Or is that what he hired a staff for?

By: mumkin

mumkin — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 13:13:52 -0800

360! Today's the day to get your tag on.

By: mumkin

mumkin — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 15:50:30 -0800

245... they're going fast, folks, get 'em while you can!

By: CKmtl

CKmtl — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 16:16:48 -0800

The mother-of-all-longboats, going in reverse. And the shore's in sight.

By: Razzle Bathbone

Razzle Bathbone — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 16:33:13 -0800

194!!! We can finally kill this mofo today. So is the last link going to be a BUSHSUX post or a brokenlink by mathowie?

By: jessamyn

jessamyn — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 17:17:08 -0800

OMG.

By: CKmtl

CKmtl — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 17:29:11 -0800

Land, HOOOO!

By: Razzle Bathbone

Razzle Bathbone — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 17:45:11 -0800

78 and tagging furiously

By: jessamyn

jessamyn — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 18:21:36 -0800

Is it possible I tagged the last one? I hit "give me more" and there were no more....

By: OmieWise

OmieWise — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 18:21:41 -0800

Well, I just went for more and there weren't no more.

By: OmieWise

OmieWise — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 18:22:30 -0800

Congratulations!

By: Razzle Bathbone

Razzle Bathbone — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 18:23:10 -0800

Done! And my last one was a brokenlink to an article about Ariel Sharon trying to legalize the use of torture posted by Postroad.

By: jessamyn

jessamyn — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 18:23:38 -0800

Hey that was my last one too!

By: Razzle Bathbone

Razzle Bathbone — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 18:23:50 -0800

Huh, where are the balloons and champagne?

By: Razzle Bathbone

Razzle Bathbone — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 18:24:10 -0800

Quick post it as a bug

By: CKmtl

CKmtl — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 18:24:10 -0800

*pokes Give Me More*

The counter at the top says there's still one left. Weird.

By: Razzle Bathbone

Razzle Bathbone — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 18:26:23 -0800

Same here. The Unknown Post. (quietly playing Taps for it)

By: jessamyn

jessamyn — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 18:28:24 -0800

Hope this is acceptable.

By: Razzle Bathbone

Razzle Bathbone — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 18:30:12 -0800

Yay!! Shredding documents here at work so I can make my own tickertape parade.

By: jessamyn

jessamyn — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 18:31:48 -0800

By: OmieWise

OmieWise — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 18:35:35 -0800

Whoa! That's such a sight (site) for sore eyes.

By: cortex

cortex — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 18:36:53 -0800

HAPPY NEW YEAR

By: Razzle Bathbone

Razzle Bathbone — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 18:37:53 -0800

Can't...stop...staring....at....panda....ass

By: jessamyn

jessamyn — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 18:37:56 -0800

By: jessamyn

jessamyn — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 18:42:48 -0800

But seriously... thanks so much for all the awesome tagging help over the last ten months. We tagged 43,000 posts (well, 42998) and now we have a totally tagged dataset that we can... do something with. I'll see fi we can make the tagging data somehow available -- somehow without making all the content on the website downloadable, we've been sort of holding off on that -- so we can crunch some numbers. We'll make some sort of OMG WE'RE DONE post real soonish.

For the record, the very last tag was added by Bazzle Rathbone at 6:22 EST. Tags were: brokenlink israel.

By: mumkin

mumkin — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 18:50:29 -0800

Hooray!

So, when new posts are made and the OP fails to include tags, will they become available via the tagging tool? I had a few AskMes drift-in after we were ostensibly all done with them; I didn't pay attention to the posting date, but assumed in retrospect that they were new, untagged posts.

Also, any plans for the normalization stage? Is tag clean-up going to be a mod-only task, or a volunteer effort as well? There are certainly a lot of posts tagged new, york, and city (for example) which could stand a spot of cleanup.

By: jessamyn

jessamyn — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 18:52:43 -0800

Well right now people can't post wihtout adding tags. In the rare instance where something is deleted and undeleted the tags don't come with -- we remove tags from all deleted posts -- so we see this rarely but it does happen. I think normalization will be the next step but we may need to be a little more targeted and directed about it. Maybe a page on the wiki that points out some of the problems, I see a lot of firstname lastname tags instead of firstnamelastname or a lot of tags where phrases are split up so you see 'of' a lot which is terrible, might help us get started with that.

By: donnagirl

donnagirl — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 19:14:30 -0800

YAY!!!! I was distracted by March Madness, and when I looked back, it was done! So very very very happy!

By: nkknkk

nkknkk — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 21:41:58 -0800

WOO! I was at March Madness games myself, but I KNEW we could finish today. Congrats, everyone!

By: nkknkk

nkknkk — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 21:52:09 -0800

... um, am I lame to say I ALREADY miss this project? What's next, Jessamyn??

By: Rumple

Rumple — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 22:09:54 -0800

tag you're it

By: cortex

cortex — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 22:36:20 -0800

Next I unleash you all on a variety of mind-numbing but amusing-to-me archives sieving projects.

By: mumkin

mumkin — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 23:11:29 -0800

No way am I counting all of the dots.

By: timeistight

timeistight — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 23:41:01 -0800

Kudos to all the taggers. I tried a few times but I just didn't have the stomach for it.

By: LobsterMitten

LobsterMitten — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 00:33:01 -0800

You guys rule. Also, sparkly panda ass.

By: LobsterMitten

LobsterMitten — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 00:33:57 -0800

And see this MeTa for more praise and ululations.