8
votes
Standardizing tags: Grouping by continent?
Should we add continent tags? We do it with europe and sometimes with asia or south america. But I've never seen north america alongside with usa or canada. When I searched for it, north america tag was used just once, 93 days ago.
I think the best implementation of this would probably come from a sort of "implied tags" system, where it's dealt with automatically. Nobody's going to want to tag every post about SF as "north america.usa.california.san francisco" manually, and that's also just going to look ugly and be extremely unintuitive and unwieldy in all sorts of ways.
Ideally I think we'd just have it so that if someone tags something as "san francisco" it internally gets those implied "higher level" tags, to allow people to find or filter the post without those always needing to be added manually.
Even with implied tagging (which I think is a great idea btw), you will still need to eventually decide how the implied tags structure is determined, so it's probably worth discussing the standards at some point. The Canadian government's SCCAI gets my vote since Tildes is Canadian and it's already hierarchical... but ISO 3166 can also be made to work with some effort to arrange them hierarchically under continental regions.
That's fine for the wonderful shiny future utopian version of Tildes, but what about right now? What about for the next few months? How should we tag topics today?
I don't know exactly where the cutoff is, but at this point, I would lean much more towards utility than correctness/comprehensiveness. Tags like "usa" are useful for people to be able to filter in/out posts about the country, but I'm not sure that there's much utility for either "north america" or individual states right now. Both "too general" and "too specific" can be issues.
Good point. After I responded to @cfabbro listing out the 6 regions, I wondered whether anyone would actually search for news related to "north america", rather than "usa" or "canada". I certainly wouldn't use an "oceania" filter; I'd always look for "australia".
Yeah, back when this was originally discussed ages ago I even suggested ignoring the top level of the SCCAI in some cases for exactly that reason. If you go one level deeper (or two in the case of Oceania) it starts to get a bit more realistic as to what people might actually use tags to search for.
E.g. Americas is broken down in to North America, Central America, Caribbean and Bermuda, and South America. Asia is broken down in to West Central Asia and the Middle East, Eastern Asia, Southeast Asia, and Southern Asia. Oceania is broken down in to... a lot of things, including Australia.
It's definitely not a one size fits all solution though. E.g. I imagine searching for Europe might be common but Western Europe rare so it might be pointless to include that subdivision for now. Middle East is probably more usable a tag than "West Central Asia and the Middle East". Etc..
If/when implied tags and synonymous tags are implemented, then it won't really matter though and all the levels and variants can be included (albeit in the background).
That would work relatively well until you get to a place like London. Then the implied tag would have to guess.
Should the implied tag default to Vancouver, BC, Canada; should it default to Vancouver, WA, USA? I feel like having a hierarchical tagging system would be a benefit, but perhaps some tweaking in the display? Such as displaying the deepest level tag (or 3 if a city name is listed) with the rest being visible via mouse-over or some other way of tidying it up.
I saw that "south america" tag yesterday, which was the first time I'd seen a "south america" tag and it made me realise that I have never seen a "north america" tag.
Now that you've made me think about it, I see that this reflects an Anglosphere-centric view of the world. The U.S.A., Canada, and the United Kingdom are all treated separately, but the rest of the world is divided up into generic chunks: Europe, Africa, Asia, Middle East.
I'm happy to go with regional tags. I've suggested something like this before.
However, this does lead to definitional problems. I've encountered this problem before on a news-related subreddit, when we wanted to add tags and filters for various geographical regions. How general or specific do we get? Do we separate out Central America? Is Mexico part of North America or Central America? Is the Middle East a separate region, or just part of Europe or Asia? Do we use Eurasia? Do we separate out South Asia and Central Asia and Southeast Asia? How do we group Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific islands - Australasia, Oceania, Pacifica?
It gets messy.
We could just use the seven-continent model. Or someone somewhere linked to an offical Canadian government definition of regions of the world (because Tildes is hosted in Canada).
That was me. And I still think relying on the established standards of the Canadian government is the safest way to go about regional tagging, since it allows Tildes to avoid making decisions regarding geopolitical conflicts (e.g. Taiwan, China, Tibet, etc). The Canadian government's "Standard Classification of Countries and Areas of Interest" (SCCAI) is also already hierarchical which makes it ideal:
http://www23.statcan.gc.ca/imdb/p3VD.pl?Function=getVD&TVD=492961
(click the code numbers to go a level deeper)
I don't disagree. Like I said, dividing the world up into regions is a very messy business!
So... that would give us 6 top-level regions to work with:
So, we'd tag all stories relevant to a particular country with their region and their country: "americas" + "usa", for example, or "oceania" + "australia".
Would this be a case where hierarchical tags like "americas.usa" and "oceania.australia" would be useful? However, I seem to remember that there's something funky about using hierarchical tags as filters: we can filter for one but not the other?
Right now I would avoid using hierarchical tagging for regions simply because there is currently no way to disentangle them... i.e. if you tag something
americas.usa.california.san_francisco, people who search?tag=san_franciscoor?tag=californiawill get no results.E.g. https://tildes.net/?tag=test.2 shows my two old test topics, but https://tildes.net/?tag=2 shows neither.
I think it would be helpful