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Is there any progress on tag synonyms?
I know there's a task for grouping synonymous tags together, like "humor" and "humour". How high a priority is this?
I ask because poor @mycketforvirrad shouldn't have to feel like he needs to add a tag for "wildfires" every time someone posts a topic about the Australia bushfires (and tags it "bushfires").
Hello. As some of you may have noticed I may enjoy the tagging aspect of Tildes a little more than most here. A combination of far too much free time at this stage of my life and a lifelong obsession with categorisation. Quirks can take many forms, apparently.
The intricacies of the tagging system here on Tildes fascinates me and I'm going to bookmark my very first topic with this post. I'm curious to watch and participate in the evolution of this element of Tildes.
The differing terminology seen across the various English speaking countries is an interesting problem for an aggregation site with users across the world. A global, agreed upon system of categorisation is hard enough at the best of times. And for some reason a great deal of the variances can be found in a topic very dear to my posting history. Transport. Here's a very much non-exhaustive list of the few I often deliberate over:
I'd personally love to see a system where these synonyms are grouped together somehow, but I very much understand that there are complexities in enacting this on the site (it's well beyond my very laymans understanding of coding and site infrastructure) and its lower priority in the grand scheme of things.
Nevertheless, I will continue to keep tagging to the best of my abilities. Some see it as grunt work, and maybe it is, but for now it's grunt work I have an unusal soft spot for. I'm certainly not a voracious commenter here and my posting history can best be described as serving a niche. My role in tagging the fascinating content that others post on a daily basis is my way of giving back to this fantastic little community.
And as a caveat I feel I always have to add when my behind the scenes work gets noticed is: don't hesitate to drop me a PM if you ever feel one of my tags is inappropriate or a topic move to another subgroup isn't a good fit. In my short time here I've grown to love the collaborative effort that goes on behind the scenes and embrace the dialogue that can come from it. I never intend any of my additions or ammendments maliciously or to appear condescending. I'm very easy going/approachable and definitely open minded enough to acknowledge when I might have misread a topic or simply be wrong.
Anyway. Maybe I should stop waffling.
I'd like to start by thanking you for your contributions. Like you say, we all give to Tildes in our different ways, and your efforts are appreciated.
I remember when you first started posting here, and I added tags to some of your posts. You complained! I think that's ironic, considering what you do now. :) But we discussed the use of tags here on Tildes, and you've become a super-tagger since then.
And we appreciate it. Thank you.
We may be able to leverage https://www.datamuse.com/api/ to do synonym lookups. Haven't thought of how this could be integrated yet. Perhaps when doing tag lookups, also accept synonyms of the searched tag?
Not that I'm aware of... but it's likely a pretty low priority (but high effort to implement) feature, so that's not really all that surprising.
BTW, if you or anyone else want to know if there is any progress on particular issues, you can search for them on the gitlab issues page (e.g. https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/issues?scope=all&state=opened&search=synonym). If there is no "assignee" (person currently working on the issue) or "in progress" label on the issue, then chances are there has been no progress yet. And in this case there is neither, although the related suggestions have been set to "stage::accepted" (meaning Deimos would like them to be implemented eventually).
The merge request page is also another place you can check to keep tabs on changes coming down the Tildes development pipeline: https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/merge_requests
As well as the commit log to see the latest changes that have actually been implemented already: https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/commits/master
It's not implemented "properly", but I can add that one in manually if it's happening a lot. "bushfires" is always removed and replaced with "wildfires"?
Oi, cobber! Racist, much? Why not replace "wildfires" with "bushfires"?
That's why I'm talking about synonyms, rather than replacements: so we don't obliterate local dialects and make everything American.
Ah, hmm. That doesn't really fit into what the current system does at all then. Right now it handles things like: if someone tries to tag a topic with "spoilers" it will change it to "spoiler", so that we don't end up having both applied to topics randomly. It's just impossible to tag anything as "spoilers", it will always be converted to "spoiler".
Making it so that you could do things like search "wildfires" and have everything with "bushfires" also come back would be totally different. Not impossible, but it would definitely take some work.
Ah! I've just had an idea.
Is it possible to automatically add tags to a post? Could there be a sub-routine which says "If a post has a 'bushfires' tag, add a 'wildfires' tag" (and vice versa)?
Definitely possible, but not set up at all right now. I might be able to add something quick for it, I'll try to take a look sometime soon.
I know it's not a high priority. I've just been reminded of this task by seeing poor @mycketforvirrad add "wildfires" tags to all the stories about Australian bushfires. He shouldn't have to do that.
How do you know what another user is tagging
Never knew what