Tags: a prototype tool

A recent diary on tags discussed the problem of spurious spaces on tag matching and searching. And the tag cleanup project (see Tag:editor_portal) people spend much time normalizing tags, changing "GBW" and "Bush" to "George W. Bush", for example. Part of the problem is editorializing ("Dumbya"), part of the problem is simple misspellings ("Afganistan") and input error, but a large part of the problem is just not knowing the proper tag to use.

So I've put together a tool to build a tagstring from a menu of choices. The idea is not to include every possible tag in a perfect taxonomy, but to provide the proper tag for common, easily misspelled, and potentially ambiguous tags. It won't handle 5000 tags, but should handle a couple of hundred pretty easily.

more on the flip...

It builds a comma separated tagstring (easily changed to semicolons when the time comes) which can be cut and pasted and plopped into the tag box of a diary entry. Those tags not included in the menu can then be added "by hand."

As an "added extra special bonus feature which may be taken away if it turns out to be a stupid idea" (tm) there's a dKosopedia page here which is the input data for the menu. The idea is that at reasonably frequent intervals a bot comes along and rebuilds the menu from the data on this page. If this proves unwieldy then this page will be locked down and changes will be moderated by tag librarian types, but for now let's see what happens.

Note that my initial choice of menu items was mainly for testing, and is not set in stone.

Please try it out and let me know what you think.