Continuing the discussion from Announcing… the IFDB Tag Manipulator!:
Are you really considering allowing anyone to remove a tag?
That seems like a recipe for trouble.
Yes.
Today, users “own” their tags. You can delete your own tags, but not anybody else’s.
Instead, the tags should just be an ordinary, shared fact about a game, like the game’s description, genre, or external links.
You should edit them on the
editgamepage, submit changes (including deleting anyone else’s tags), and have those changes appear in edit history.
(Comments are welcome.)
FWIW, this will be a lot of work, so I’m not likely to do it right away.
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This should most definitely not be done.
I’m not sure how much you’ve been watching the various tag-related threads, but even highly involved, well-meaning people motivated by the highest common good often disagree about tags. One person’s trash is another person’s treasure, and short phrases are prone to ambiguity and/or misinterpretation. It’s the nature of a tag cloud to be the product of a community’s decisions, not a single person’s.
By all means, there should be some moderated process for tag merging in certain cases or even straight-up tag deletion in extreme cases (i.e. violations of terms of service), but just throwing it out there for anyone creates the possibility for what amounts to serious vandalism.
To use just one example that has come up, the Inglish tag looked on first glance to be a spelling error or maybe just some inscrutable/nonsensical garbage data. Somebody figured out that it was the brand name for a particular parser technology.
What good is expected to come from allowing random users to undo the contributions of others?
Logistically, it’s just no feasible for tag deletion to be handled by staff. I worked on it enthusiastically for a bit but I wasn’t able to keep up with the number of suggestions.
I could see using a certain trust level for removing tags (there is or was an unused trust level in the system) but restricting removal to admin use only seems like a bad idea.
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Also, the rest of a game’s IFDB page is already editable by anyone, and as far as I know there haven’t been any major issues with vandalism.
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I’m all for a tag management volunteer committee, if it’s too much work for admins, but even benign neglect (i.e. just leaving “bad” tags to linger) would be preferable to allowing any random user to delete someone else’s contribution.
The benefit of merging tags with identical meaning has been discussed at some length, but I haven’t seen anyone make a case for the ostensible benefit to be obtained by allowing uncontrolled deletion of tags. Again: What good is expected to come from this proposed change?
I think what is proposed is that an individual game’s association with a tag can be undone by anyone (but like any other edit to a game, this change is publicly visible in the game’s history).
(And not, for instance, one-stroke removal of a tag from all games that had it and forgetting it ever existed.)
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People also have the authority to delete game links, descriptions, and so on from any page they want. Why should tags be treated differently?
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From what Dan says, the current system of user-owned tags doesn’t gain us anything. Removing unnecessary complexity is always a benefit – just a question of whether anybody wants to put in the effort.
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I thought about this a bit harder and I do kinda see @otistdog’s point here.
People don’t go messing around with external links because they are matters of objective fact. But tags are judgment calls. Is this game surreal? Is it horror or is it just spooky?
And then there’s tag consolidation. You could imagine someone bulk adding and bulk deleting a bunch of tags using the API, and even getting in edit wars about them, in a way that I don’t think is likely/plausible for description, external links, etc.
I’ll keep thinking about what I want to do about this.
I was primarily objecting to the idea of someone deleting someone else’s “owned” tags.
I do like tag ownership. That seems to be the minority viewpoint. If tags aren’t owned, then the idea that anyone could delete them makes sense. I would anticipate conflict due to the subjective nature of tags, as you note, but the commentary of moderators indicates that historically this has not been a problem for other publicly-revisable data.
If that’s the direction things are going, then I do hope owned tags will remain as a personal organizational tool, even if they’re not publicly viewable.
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It could make sense to even give private flags a distinct name - labels for example - just to reduce confusion with public flags.
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When would you use a privately-owned tag rather than, say, a list?