If we're progressives we have to actually act and think like progressives, and I'd like to point out that the DK4 Main Tags are absolutely regressive in nature. In the beta they were called "Master Tags" (weird, huh?), but now they're simply an untitled list on the Tags Page labeled "Browse Tags," and are suggested every time you write a diary. Aside from "Civil Rights" and maybe "Transportation," it looks like a list you'd find on any Republican site. As a self-proclaimed progressive site we ought not embrace the same kind of tagging cosmology that right wing sites embrace. Take a look at the list:
Civil Rights
Community
Congress
Culture
Economy
Education
Elections
Energy
Environment
Health Care
Labor
Law
Media
Meta
National Security
Science
Transportation
White House
These are the tags that DK4 suggests you "consider" when you're tagging any post.
What's glaring absent? How about anything to do with gender or race, or even a hint that identity groups even exist? And where's Class on that list? A big fat nowhere. Instead we've got a set of completely idiosyncratic Library of Congress-style subject headers.
Combating racism and sexism are integral to progressive politics -- more important, I'd wager, than building high-speed, efficient public transportation. And it's people of color and women and gays and the poor who are the right wing's chief targets in their assault on America. Last time I checked on DK3 (early January), the tags "race" (6506) and "racism"(2602) combined had as many uses as "Environment" (8489) and far more usages than
Education (5676)
Energy (4522)
Health Care (4226)
Labor (3195)
Science (3420)
Immigration, a crucial issue for progressives right now, had 5077 uses, but somehow Transportation (a mere 705 uses!) is more important? LGBT came in with 2770, but it's not on the list. Sexism, Women & Gender (1363) were higher than "Transportation" too.
And yet... somebody decided that Transportation is more important than those other, far more widely used, tags.
This pisses me off. Because it tells me pretty clearly whose ideas about what's important dominate the site -- not the members, who vote with their tag usage, but somebody sitting up there who decides what sort of categories are "really" important, despite what the community writes and cares about.
It's the progressive community that makes up DK, and we ought to see ourselves -- all of us! -- reflected in the search tools of our own site.
Just because some folks don't believe identity politics "should" exist, doesn't mean that there aren't millions of Americans out there organizing around, and doing progressive work out of identity-based communities. "Civil Rights" just doesn't cut it. (Oh, and Civil Rights was missing the first time around -- it's an add-in, specifically because a bunch of us were appalled at its absence.) "Labor" isn't a substitute for "Class," either. This isn't just about Main Subject Tags -- it's about respect for women, people of color, class-based organizers, the GLBT community, and other groups of progressives who do massive amounts of work to promote progressive causes in the U.S., and who deserve recognition and inclusive categorization in their own community social networks.
This is not a minor issue -- categorizations constrain our thinking. If we're excluded, we can't find ourselves, or we have to fragment ourselves over a dozen categories. And sure, we can make up any tag we want (and people will use race, gender, immigration, etc. as tags), but they will never be represented proportionately in the explicit hierarchy.
I would like to see "Racism" and "Sexism" become top-level tags. Maybe class-based organizers can suggest a similar tag to encompass their interests. And I'd like to see a top-level category tag called "Identity Groups," under which we could locate the diverse groups represented on DK, from BlackKos, to the amazing diaries posted regularly by members of the American Indian community, to all the incredible LGBT diaries, and the diaries that address the rights of the differently abled. "Immigration" should absolutely be a top-level tag in our list, too.