Plea for a tagging flag

September 28, 2009 10:00 AM

Improving tagging in a poorly tagged post.

Do mods ever add tags to a thread when it's as bare-bones as one like this one?

I'm always surprised when I see such poor tagging on something- to me this post isn't about roommates at all, let alone only roommates.

Perhaps there should be a flag for 'needs retagging' or something like that. Seems like the search function could benefit greatly from improvements made to some posts' tags in this manner, and be less likely to get lost in the rubble down the road.

posted by sunshinesky to feature requests at 10:00 AM (23 comments total)

I like the idea of flagging for poor tagging.

If this is something that happens often enough, instead of putting it on the mods to rectify and tag, maybe we can turn it into a volunteer job like the back tagging volunteers we had previously? I'd help.
posted by jerseygirl at 10:06 AM on September 28

I would be happy to help too. It would make searching so much more efficient.
posted by Kimberly at 10:10 AM on September 28

Looks like somebody wants a little "backtagging superstar" flag in their profile...
posted by Grither at 10:10 AM on September 28

Can't you just email the OP and suggest some tags to add?

In the case of Anonymous, just leave anonymous alone. He or she has enough problems to worry about as it is.
posted by chillmost at 10:27 AM on September 28 [1 favorite]

Yes, mods can and do add tags to threads but not very often. I agree that the tag in this case isn't the most helpful tag, but we have to assume that it's an aspect of the question that the poster felt was important. I'm not sure that bad tagging (or insufficient tagging) is frequent enough to warrant its own flag.

Just ran some quick numbers: out of 2,563 questions in the last 30 days, 127 have a single tag and 356 questions have two tags. It scales up pretty quickly from there. But the number of tags isn't necessarily an indication that it's a bad tag, so this is just showing that most questions have three or more tags that should provide help finding the question later.
posted by pb at 10:28 AM on September 28

How should the post have been tagged?
posted by Jaltcoh at 10:50 AM on September 28

I've been thinking about this, too (I'm geeky like that), especially when seeing the broad spectrum of tagging (especially with tags that are multiple words strung together: do you simply omit spaces, add in dashes or underscores, or list each word as a separate tag?), but I've decided it's one of things that is beyond my control, and I should think about other things.

However, if you're co-linked to another MeFite (linked to and by that other user), you can add tags to their posts, as I was informed by this MetaTalk thread.
posted by filthy light thief at 10:55 AM on September 28

In semi-related news, there are still a large amount of past MetaTalk threads that are missing tags, if anyone still remembers that project.
posted by smackfu at 10:57 AM on September 28

How should the post have been tagged?
With more detail.
posted by carsonb at 10:58 AM on September 28

It could have been tagged better with "bills", "apartment" and "credit". But that is at the poster's discretion. I was going to say perhaps she doesn't want her boyfriend running across the question easily, but later in the thread she makes it clear that is not the case. Still, I think TAG MOAR is bad in AskMe, because there could be any number of reasons someone didn't add more tags. On the blue I can see it though.
posted by cashman at 11:01 AM on September 28

With more detail.

Like ... ?
posted by Jaltcoh at 11:02 AM on September 28

It could have been tagged better with "bills", "apartment" and "credit".

OK, "bills" is good. "Credit" would have been pretty vague, not necessarily useful. "Roommate" practically implies "apartment" but is more specific; thus, "roommate" seems more useful than "apartment."

So basically the poster missed out on one useful tag? I'm not sure that deserves a MeTa or a new feature.
posted by Jaltcoh at 11:07 AM on September 28

The tags thing bothers me, too, and I think it happens because we don't understand exactly how tags are used later.

As examples from recent AskMe posts that could be fixed if we had a way to do it easily:
- This one's going to be hard for anyone searching for "Italy".
- This one has a jokey tag: someinternetmobjusticewouldbelovely is not so helpful.
- This one is an example of putting the words of a sentence into the tags, including non-helpful tags like "on" and "to".
- This one is an example of adding information in the tag which is not included in the question.

I think we could help prevent some of these if we had explanatory text near the field where the user adds tags.
posted by Houstonian at 11:19 AM on September 28

I'd say misspelling Italy and putting a sentence as separate tags are pretty clear candidates for "HTML/Display Error" flags.

OTOH, keep in mind that tags are one of the few things that we have edit privileges for, so the question asker could fix both of these themselves, if they wished.
posted by smackfu at 11:29 AM on September 28

> I like the idea of flagging for poor tagging.

This is something I have campaigned for in the past too.
posted by nowonmai at 11:46 AM on September 28

If you want really clever, pb could a flag button to the tag box, and then give it its own set of options, like:

Tag is too general.
Tag is misspelled.
Tag is jokey.
Tags include random words (from a sentence).
Tag is offensive/sexist/racist.
posted by smackfu at 12:20 PM on September 28 [1 favorite]

flagged and tagged.
posted by blue_beetle at 12:44 PM on September 28

I usually send a friendly memail to the poster, saying that filling out the tags more will help people find their post faster if they were looking for similar questions.
posted by ArgentCorvid at 12:52 PM on September 28

I add tags when I see them. You can IM/MeMail cortex or I to have us add tags or MeMail the poster. We don't really need more flags, in my opinion, because that implies that this is something mods need to do, but really pretty much anyone has the sense to add tags.
posted by jessamyn at 1:06 PM on September 28

Flag it!
Tag it!
20 dollars same as in town, oh!
Flag it!
Tag it!

[jam]
posted by SpiffyRob at 2:17 PM on September 28

However, if you're co-linked to another MeFite (linked to and by that other user), you can add tags to their posts

I dislike having this knowledge, because now I must resist the temptation to add the "buttsLOL" tag whenever someone I know makes a post.
posted by little e at 5:51 PM on September 28 [2 favorites]

Yo dawg, we heard you like tagging so we put a pony on your 'filter so you can flag bad tags.
posted by double block and bleed at 8:14 PM on September 28

If you want really clever, pb could a flag button to the tag box, and then give it its own set of options

A flagtaglet?
posted by flabdablet at 3:30 AM on September 30 [1 favorite]