Rob Howard's Blog

# re: Should tags be moderated?

Should tags be moderated?  No.

Should the community come down on things that shouldn't be on the front page?  The problem is that people tend to just horribly complain whine and scream.  So that would be counter productive also.  If it could be done in a positive way, thats the only way that I see it working.

# re: Should tags be moderated?

No, tags should never be moderated.  But, tags should be treated as a personal controlled vocabulary.  I talked about this last Nov. in my Random Acts of Senseless Tagging post: http://donxml.com/allthingstechie/archive/2005/11/14/2272.aspx

Letting everyone create their own personal controlled vocab and giving them the ability to map it to other known controlled vocabs is the future.  The problem is that to accomplish this, it will take someone with ties into the Blog Engine world, the Blog Reader world, the Blog Editor world, along with ties to ATOM and is use to working with standards organizations.  This is not something that one corporation can build and patent, but will require a bunch of open source implementations, plus some corporate initatives.  But it can, and will be done, eventually.

# re: Should tags be moderated?

OK, I'll take the contrarian approach (sort of).

Yes, I think tags should be moderated, but after the fact. Some moderator should be capable of marking TagX as being a synonym for TagY.

For example, at Del.icio.us, some people tag an item as '.net', others 'dotnet'. Just about any non-trivial topic has at least this many synonyms. If I want to watch a tag for new items, I have to create two (or more) subscriptions. If someone marks them as synonyms, then I get them all using my terms.

Re-reading Don's post, I think we might be saying the same thing -- allow any tags, but allow the identification of synonyms (Don's just saying leave it to the user, I'm saying either that or a moderator).

# re: Should tags be moderated?

Yes.  Sort of.  Optionally.  

In some communities, it doesn't make sense to moderate, but in others it may, so a checkbox option to enable or disable moderation (just like comments??) would be a wise choice.  Leave it up to the site owner, not the content creator.

# re: Should tags be moderated?

The idea behind personal tags and controlled vocabs, is that I only control my Point of View.  So, I can create my own tags and create my own Point of View Mapping to a known Control Vocab, but my PoV mapping can be (and probably will be) different than the inverse, a known entity's Controlled Vocab to my Controlled Vocab.  This way I can say Tag .Net in my vocab equals tag .Net in the known Controlled Vocab, but the known Controlled Vocab can say it's tag .Net is greater than my tag .Net.  It is all based on the Pov (sort of like the theory of relativity as it relates to velocity, it is all relative velocity).

So you have a namespace urn:weblogs.asp.net/cvex which contains all the tags for the site weblogs.asp.net (as controlled by the owners of the site) and it has the tag (or term) repesented by  urn:weblogs.asp.net/cvex/.net

Then you also have the namespace urn:weblogs.asp.net/rhoward/cvex which contains Rob's tags.  And he has a tag called .Net represented by urn:weblogs.asp.net/rhoward/cvex/.Net

Now, Rob can say  urn:weblogs.asp.net/rhoward/cvex/.Net is equal to urn:weblogs.asp.net/cvex/.net but the owners of the site weblogs.asp.net (who are the owners of the vocab) can say urn:weblogs.asp.net/cvex/.net is greater than urn:weblogs.asp.net/rhoward/cvex/.Net.

Both tags exist and are related via the individual mappings, but the mean is inferred by the Point of View one wishes to take.  The idea here is that eventually, you can make queries based on a Point of View, and infer relationships to other items not explicitly tagged in your point of view.

# re: Should tags be moderated?

OK, that makes sense to me (Don). It's essentially a moderation of sorts. Just that each person creates their own moderation/mappings. I like the notion of URIs for them as well.

# re: Should tags be moderated?

I don't mind if the option is available for Tag moderation, but I'll probably never use it.  A better option is tag synonyms, as Kent suggested.

# re: Should tags be moderated?

I created an internal blog to use as my status report at work.  I create tags to identify the different things I am working on.  My boss asked me if we could predefine those tags and only let people select the appropriate tags for things that we work on.  That way the tags are the same across all blogs.  I think making TAG be te same across all blogs is a good thing.

# re: Should tags be moderated?

If you're going to moderate tags which are set by the blogger him/herself, the next step is moderating the text the blogger wrote. It's not the business of the moderator to alter a tag on a blog post, because the moderator might not understand why a tag is defined with a blogpost.

Projected to weblogs.asp.net: it's a bit of a mess. I'm sure most people add more tags than they actually think they should add simply to get the post on the frontpage/mainfeed.

# re: Should tags be moderated?

Why don't we leave it as optional.  But if you ask me, I would say no.  There are so many people here who is really into commenting on issues.

# re: Should tags be moderated?

Moderated how and by whom?

Is this going to stay a community site or become more and more of a controled forum.

# re: Should tags be moderated?

"However, much like everything else it gets abused"

And it will.... Moderation (optional of course) would be a good addition

# re: Should tags be moderated?

I think the best is to guide casual users towards predefined tags and allow advanced users to add additional tags. The current interface is a text box followed by a button, so the flow kind of makes people think they should be making up tags. I think if the interface had a multi-select for predefined tags (checkboxes, etc.) and adding user defined tags required an extra step, you'd find that most users would stick with what's in the box.

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