Tag cleanup (replacing and renaming) and points
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Hi.
I'm still getting to grasp how stuff works on the Developer Network, and today I'm trying to do some cleanup with the tags. I've found some possibly contradicting posts on how points are affected when tags are removed, so I'm trying to clarify and ask for comments about how to do proper tag cleanup.
In July Marius said "you will lose points if somebody deletes your tag":http://developer.qt.nokia.com/forums/viewthread/222, but I think this has changed, as in a recent post he said "the original tagger is safely stored":http://developer.qt.nokia.com/forums/viewthread/2128/P15#11153.
That's a sign of relief, because this morning I started looking for typos on tags, and since I can't edit them (IIRC is not implemented for non-admins), I had to delete the original tag and place a new one. I also did the same for tags that didn't had typos, but had a synonym, and the synonym had much more posts tagged like this.
I think that I gained a lot of points like this, and I want to be honest and ask first if I did right or not, before I continue with this. One case worth mentioning was the "mac osx" tag. I thought it obviously was a typo, since it's either "mac os x", or "macosx" or "osx", but it doesn't make sense one space between two words, and no space between the other two, so I replaced all occurrences with "mac os x". There were about 40 faqs/posts/etc. with the old tag. I freaked out when I realized that I maybe "stole" those points from others.
So in case I did that, I'm deeply sorry. I don't want to step on other's toes, and much less to adulterate project elf's results.
I've found other tags that are worth renaming, but if I do that manually (deleting, then adding), even if I don't erase somebody else's points, I will gain plenty of points easily. I think it's worth it, because I acted honestly, doing a rename that I think it makes plenty of sense, but before I go on, I want to come clean and ask for permission from the admins and the other users.
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Hmm... hey Marius, this sounds like a feature waiting to happen (ha ha ha!) Maybe a "tag group" which could be set by higher-level folks, which would be able to say "if someone enters anything in the group (OSX, MacOS, MacOSX, Mac OSX, Mac OS X) then set the tag to Mac OSX" or such.
The really cool one would be if it was smart enough to list "close matches", to hopefully prevent multiple tags before they get entered...
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[quote author="GordonSchumacher" date="1291819888"]Hmm... hey Marius, this sounds like a feature waiting to happen (ha ha ha!) Maybe a "tag group" which could be set by higher-level folks, which would be able to say "if someone enters anything in the group (OSX, MacOS, MacOSX, Mac OSX, Mac OS X) then set the tag to Mac OSX" or such.
The really cool one would be if it was smart enough to list "close matches", to hopefully prevent multiple tags before they get entered...[/quote]
+1
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There are some ongoing discussion on improving the tag mechanisms here:
"Suggestion] Filter popular tags by evaluation of the edit line":http://developer.qt.nokia.com/forums/viewthread/2177/
"Suggestion: Auto completion for tags":http://developer.qt.nokia.com/forums/viewthread/2170/P15Together with some bug reports regarding this:
"QTWEBSITE-120":http://bugreports.qt.nokia.com/browse/QTWEBSITE-120
"QTWEBSITE-122":http://bugreports.qt.nokia.com/browse/QTWEBSITE-122IMHO, that problem will decrease once these are implemented.
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Hi, thank you for bringing this up with a well thought out post.
[quote author="disperso" date="1291818563"]In July Marius said "you will lose points if somebody deletes your tag":http://developer.qt.nokia.com/forums/viewthread/222, but I think this has changed, as in a recent post he said "the original tagger is safely stored":http://developer.qt.nokia.com/forums/viewthread/2128/P15#11153.[/quote]
This still holds true. If you add a tag, like "qt quick" and it is later removed, you get 2 points at first but then loose them when the tag is no longer in use. But if someone else (let's call him Bob) adds "qt creator" again as a tag to that same page, you get 2 points, not Bob.
So by cleaning up tags there will be movement in tag points between member. But you are cleaning up tags, fixing spelling etc and so the points are earned. The ones who posted the original tags will loose the points but it is the nature of tagging on DevNet. A solution would be as GordonSchumacher suggests:
[quote author="GordonSchumacher" date="1291819888"]Hmm... hey Marius, this sounds like a feature waiting to happen (ha ha ha!) Maybe a "tag group" which could be set by higher-level folks, which would be able to say "if someone enters anything in the group (OSX, MacOS, MacOSX, Mac OSX, Mac OS X) then set the tag to Mac OSX" or such.
The really cool one would be if it was smart enough to list "close matches", to hopefully prevent multiple tags before they get entered...[/quote]
Tag "aliases", or "synonyms", is definitely on the wishlist. It's something I will bring up with the makers of the "Tag module":http://www.solspace.com/ as a key feature for any sizable tag universe.
For more on tagging and the future please check out the links posted by Sir Volker.
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I think that tag merging was planned or working in the backend (I can't remember where I saw the post), but I don't know if the functionality was this. I would do it this way:
If foobar and foobaz are two merged tags, one can still use whatever form, but when one looks for stuff tagged as foobar, you get the results of things tagged as either foobar or foobaz.
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By the way, I mentioned this a while ago "here":http://developer.qt.nokia.com/forums/viewthread/2128
[quote]
Just to clarify on the consistent tags:
If someone tries to tag a word, it looks up all terms that mean the same thing for that word in the system . Then it chooses the standard tag word and adds this to the list.
Later when someone searches a tag word, it uses the same method to find the tag (convert to standard name and find).
In fact, you could go over the tag database with a script (once the synonym library is done) to ensure old tags are standardised too.
Example:
I add tag ‘visual studio’ and system adds ‘msvc’
Later someone searches for ‘microsoft vc++’ and it recognises it as ‘msvc’ and finds all related to this.
[/quote]Merged tags, done manually by users. Works as OP suggested but an automatic process once the tags are associated. Tags will be much easier when this is complete :)
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[quote author="mariusg" date="1291821223"]
This still holds true. If you add a tag, like "qt quick" and it is later removed, you get 2 points at first but then loose them when the tag is no longer in use. But if someone else (let's call him Bob) adds "qt creator" again as a tag to that same page, you get 2 points, not Bob.
(...)
So by cleaning up tags there will be movement in tag points between member. But you are cleaning up tags, fixing spelling etc and so the points are earned. The ones who posted the original tags will loose the points but it is the nature of tagging on DevNet. [/quote]I think this is all OK for small changes, so I will continue to do that for those.
However, what about mass renaming of a tag? Can the admins do that without point changes? I think that this can lead to some sort of "edit war", where one can replace one tag from a set of articles with another that likes more, but other person can do the same with a third tag. :-P
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disperso, admins can do it. Just write a request to Marius with tags you want to merge.
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I've been merging key tags like the "qt quick" variants from time to time. If you find a major merge is needed shoot me a mail.