We’d like to build a small community around taggers – the people who maintain the ontology of LessWrong’s library ensuring that desired information can always be found.
Maybe this is a dumb question but, is this actually needed?
Can we get what we want with people just randomly adding tags when they notice? Do we need to have people specializing on this?
I’d expect that a bunch of work would be needed up front to get the tag system into a good state, but I’d think most of that work has been done already (by the LW team, and others). And then going forward I’d expect much less work to be required. Am I missing something?
I think tagging is actually pretty hard. Like, by default you get a ton of synonyms of the same concepts, and there aren’t good redirects, and the tags don’t have good descriptions, and there is lots of ambiguity, and when someone creates a new tag old posts don’t reliably get tagged. Our tagging system is also more similar to being a wiki, and in-general my research into wikis suggests that basically all functional ones are maintained by a relatively small group of highly dedicated editors, and that it generally doesn’t work to just have everyone randomly edit and add things.
Maybe this is a dumb question but, is this actually needed?
Can we get what we want with people just randomly adding tags when they notice? Do we need to have people specializing on this?
I’d expect that a bunch of work would be needed up front to get the tag system into a good state, but I’d think most of that work has been done already (by the LW team, and others). And then going forward I’d expect much less work to be required. Am I missing something?
I think tagging is actually pretty hard. Like, by default you get a ton of synonyms of the same concepts, and there aren’t good redirects, and the tags don’t have good descriptions, and there is lots of ambiguity, and when someone creates a new tag old posts don’t reliably get tagged. Our tagging system is also more similar to being a wiki, and in-general my research into wikis suggests that basically all functional ones are maintained by a relatively small group of highly dedicated editors, and that it generally doesn’t work to just have everyone randomly edit and add things.
That’s helpful context. Makes sense, thanks!