Neil's answers on Categories

["Carol Geyer" <carol.geyer@oasis-open.org>]

I've paraphrased Neil's response to Bruce's comments on Categories below:

> 1. (User-visible.) When I enter the tag, it is comma-separated. When I view
> the Categories (link on the right-hand side), the tags are not delimited at
> all, so a space-delimited tag is potentially confusing. You have to run
> your mouse over the terms to see which words are part of the same tag.
> Still, I like the space-delimited tags better. There's enough extra space
> between tags in the footer of an article so that it's not confusing.

Neil: I added extra space between the tag terms on the categories tag cloud.
This 
problem also becomes less apparent as more tags are used, so that the 
weighting of the tags and relative sizes of the words becomes a stronger 
differentiator between terms.

> 2. I've got a linear list in the Taxonomy Manager. Hierarchy seems to be
> turned off at the moment.

Neil: I did that intentionally. It doesn't make sense to me how you'd have a
tag 
implementation with a hierarchy, because tags should be used by just tagging 
things and not thinking about the organization.  That said, I just enabled 
it.  So now the EdBoard can use hierarchies however you all feel it makes
sense.

> 3. Tags are a separate namespace, and the other vocabularies don't seem to
> play there. So although the doc advises that using multiple vocabularies
> can help make the tagging orthogonal (faceted), the interface is only
> offering me tags under Tags. (Basis for claim: I added "map hierarchy
> authoring" and "map relationship authoring", which appear under Product
> Features. They did not previously pop up in the autocompletion feature, and
> now they do.) So unless this changes, echoing the other vocabularies in the
> tags namespace will be a good idea.

Neil: We use those other taxonomies for an explicit purpose in our Products and
Services directories. Those are the "options" that can be checked/unchecked for
explicit content types, not free-form tagging.

We could echo as you suggest, but it would probably lead to a lot of confusion.
If you really want to do this, I would suggest we instead drop those taxonomies
and make those selections for features a form field on the content types
instead of a taxonomy.  That's really what we're using those taxonomies for
anyway.

> 4. The taxonomy manager page would be easier to use if it had navigation
> back from the page that shows the entries in a vocabulary to the list of
> vocabularies

Neil: Please don't edit the other taxonomies.  We are not using those for
Category tags.  

> 5. It would be nice if there were a direct rename function. To rename a
> category, you have to add a category that has the new name, then merge the
> old category with the new one. If you want to correct capitalization of a
> category, you have to do this in two steps since the auto-complete
> mechanism is not case sensitive.

Neil: You can rename them by merging one term.  It will tell you in the
instructions 
that you can just type in a new term name and it will create the new term and 
merge the single old term into it.

This won't actually work for fixing capitalization without renaming it twice, 
because it won't recognize the new name as any different than the old one.I 
think you will have to eventually give up on that level of control.  
Freetagging doesn't scale up well when you try to restrict the "free" part of 
it.  Or more specifically, managing it doesn't scale well when you have to 
keep up with things like that.

> 6. When renaming, there's a checkbox about relations. This seems to refer
> to relations among categories, so it doesn't need to be checked when your
> only goal is to preserve the connection between the tag and the content it
> references. The text could be clarified: "relations to other categories for
> the selected terms and add them for the merged term". (This function
> doesn't seem well-defined if you merge two sub-terms from different
> branches of a hierarchy.)

Neil: The "relations" it speaks of are related terms.  You can create links
between 
terms so that some terms are loosely related to others in the sense of "You 
might also want to read about..." - this taxonomy has no related terms.  It 
can, but it doesn't and we haven't talked about using that or exposed any 
functionality using that.  You can check it or not and it will make no 
difference for now.

> 7. (User-visible) Are we standardizing on "Sentence case" or "lower case
> except for Proper Nouns" ?

Neil: That's a user-preference and you really can't standardize it much.  
It's "free"tagging which means ultimately people will do whatever they want 
and you can hope they'll stay reasonably consistent.  At things like the 
scale of Wikipedia, freetagging tends to normalize things like this with 
minimal editorial oversight, but without scale, we'll see.

Hope that helps,
Carol