23 votes

Topic deleted by author

8 comments

  1. [2]
    Deimos
    Link
    Thanks for writing this up, Bauke. I agree that there are a lot of interesting things we can do with a more structured data system, and I hope that we'll be able to expand into that as we go. Tags...

    Thanks for writing this up, Bauke. I agree that there are a lot of interesting things we can do with a more structured data system, and I hope that we'll be able to expand into that as we go. Tags work well for some things, but are definitely not really suited for a lot of other cases.

    I think we have to be careful though. There's a good article (that I can't find again right now), that talks about how technical people often fall into the trap of trying to build way too much metadata into things. We love the idea of having all this perfectly-organized data that allows for endless possibilities for searching, filtering, etc., but in practice the large majority of people don't care about it, won't use it, and will mostly just find it overwhelming. Because of that, you often end up with the tiny group of people that do care having to do an insane amount of work to upkeep it all, or (more likely) just horribly incomplete data that's barely better than not having it at all (or sometimes even worse).

    Ideally a lot of it will be automated. If someone submits a YouTube video, we should be able to just hit their API and grab data like how long the video is, what channel it's on, and so on. All of that's useful, but doesn't add any work to the submitter. People don't really want to have to fill out a 15-field form just to submit a post, so it's best if we can automate as much as possible. That also makes it much easier to go back and add metadata retroactively, instead of needing users to manually go back and add more data to hundreds or thousands of posts when we decide there's another piece we want to have. If it's automatic, you just run all the old posts through the process again.

    Overall, all systems will have issues. Metadata can fix some of the issues with tags, but it will also cause issues of its own. We'll need to try to find a balance.

    13 votes
    1. spit-evil-olive-tips
      Link Parent
      Probably not the specific article you're thinking of, but I'm reminded of Microsoft's failed "the filesystem is really a database" WinFS. Bill Gates even talked about it in a reddit AMA. It...

      technical people often fall into the trap of trying to build way too much metadata into things.

      Probably not the specific article you're thinking of, but I'm reminded of Microsoft's failed "the filesystem is really a database" WinFS. Bill Gates even talked about it in a reddit AMA.

      It strikes me as a prime example of a bunch of techies at Microsoft thinking "I would definitely use this" and failing to understand how many average computer users have My Documents folders full of Document 1.docx, Document 1 final.docx, Document 1 final updated.docx, and so on, and how little they care about having a beautifully curated metadata schema.

      2 votes
  2. nonesuchluck
    Link
    So basically the Semantic Web on a social messaging board. I like it. I'll also point out that your categories map pretty neatly to the 5 W's (who/what/when/where/why) questions I was taught to...

    So basically the Semantic Web on a social messaging board. I like it.

    I'll also point out that your categories map pretty neatly to the 5 W's (who/what/when/where/why) questions I was taught to pursue while researching in school. I think using these names for metadata categories could leverage some previous experience for a lot of users.

    10 votes
  3. [2]
    cfabbro
    (edited )
    Link
    AFAIK this was basically the plan already. From the new site documentation I wrote (which I need to reorganize a bit before it can be merged): p.s. The reason for the further delay on the new...

    AFAIK this was basically the plan already. From the new site documentation I wrote (which I need to reorganize a bit before it can be merged):

    Metadata

    The vast majority of sites on the web include a plethora of ancillary information about themselves and their content which is typically hidden from general view and either buried in the site's code (HTML, XML, JSON, etc) or only accessible via their API (if they have one). This ancillary information, or "data about data", is known as metadata and while much of it is only really useful to web browsers and various other web applications, it also often includes information that can actually be rather useful (e.g. keywords, author identity, last modified timestamp, etc), especially to an aggregator such as Tildes. Many database sites also exist that provide APIs which can be queried so that further metadata can be acquired about a particular subject, topic or piece of media (e.g. Wikipedia, Musicbrainz, thetvdb, etc). And even where metadata is not officially provided or readily available, it can often be collated from sites by using web scraping techniques.

    Tildes intends to take full advantage of all this available metadata in order to help users refine their searches on the site and even assist them in posting topics, by doing things like suggesting a link's topic title which properly conforms to the group's title standards (e.g. ArtistName - SongName [album + (year of release)] in ~music) and automatically filling out the topic tags for them by querying relevant databases (e.g. using MusicBrainz for song/artist genres). This metadata can also be used to help users find other pertinent information or related content by linking to it in the Topic info sidebar (e.g. provide links to articles' primary sources like studies/academic papers, ISBNs for books, etc).

    p.s. The reason for the further delay on the new documentation was that I was incredibly ill the last week. Now that I am back I am finishing up the last official invite thread today and then plan on making the changes necessary to the docs so deimos can merge them.

    9 votes
    1. [2]
      Comment deleted by author
      Link Parent
      1. cfabbro
        (edited )
        Link Parent
        Oh, for sure... Sorry, I didn't mean to imply this topic wasn't worth discussing. Nothing really concrete was set in place regarding the metadata use plans, it was merely a vague plan that was...

        Oh, for sure... Sorry, I didn't mean to imply this topic wasn't worth discussing. Nothing really concrete was set in place regarding the metadata use plans, it was merely a vague plan that was discussed previously... so the more input the better, IMO.

        p.s. Paging @Amarok since he (and the other /r/listentothis mods) are the resident metadata experts.

        3 votes
  4. [2]
    Zeph
    Link
    I'm not sure this really solves anything, it's basically just adding a reminder of some general tags that you should be filling out. The best thing for improving tags will be autocomplete as you...

    I'm not sure this really solves anything, it's basically just adding a reminder of some general tags that you should be filling out.

    The best thing for improving tags will be autocomplete as you type them and community guidelines.

    5 votes
    1. [2]
      Comment deleted by author
      Link Parent
      1. Zeph
        Link Parent
        Ah I understand now. At the moment a lot of tags lack context, assigning them in to these metadata buckets allows for better search capabilities. Hierarchies could be used but this places more...

        Ah I understand now. At the moment a lot of tags lack context, assigning them in to these metadata buckets allows for better search capabilities. Hierarchies could be used but this places more decision making on the community itself (like having to use author.glenn howards), when specific metadata fields can simplify this process for everyone.

        I definitely don't believe this could replace hierarchy's though, these metadata buckets are essentially reserved top-level tags that are used as a hierarchy but official. There's cases where unofficial top-level tags are needed.

        3 votes
  5. nsz
    Link
    Deimos has talked about having synonyms for common tags with should help with keeping everything organised and uniform. Can't the same thing be done for hierarchical tags? I have yet to see one...

    Deimos has talked about having synonyms for common tags with should help with keeping everything organised and uniform. Can't the same thing be done for hierarchical tags? I have yet to see one where more then two categories are used so it would really not be ambigous. survey.ask can easily be automatically switched to ask.survey.