On Wikis and Tags
A comment on a post by Joho.

I had a long talk with Ross Mayfield (blog) about the intersection of Wikis and Tags. The Wiki people will tell you that they've already got tags because they've had wiki categories for some time. But perhaps inevitably they've take a Wiki approach to it. The goal is to get the community to converge on the one true tag set for a particular page. And the user interface (both for entering and tag navigation) is slightly awkward.

What I think is missing is the del.icio.us/Flickr UI that makes it completely trivial to enter a set of space or comma separated tags and to navigate the tags once they're in there. This suggests that it was actually the UI that was revolutionary about those sites as much as the data structures.

But there's also a deeper question here about the relationship between public pages (URIs), public shared tags and private tags. To see this problem expressed go and have a look at what Last.FM have done. Anyone can tag a Track, Album or Artist. There's then two ways of looking and searching. You can use all public tags or you can use just your own. The problem in a wiki (especially with anonymous posting) is handling the tension between the one true set of tags that the public have converged on for a page, the mess of tags applied by all editors and the set of tags you personally have applied.

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[ 20-Feb-06 8:24am ] [ , ]