Proposal:User Tags Standards

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Revision as of 12:50, 16 October 2007 by Murdos (talk | contribs) (RatingSystem, InternationalArtists + link to FolksonomyTagging (Imported from MoinMoin))
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UserTags Standards

Since the 2007-10-14 server release added support for tagging, I propose we use this page to help track of different types of tags. If everyone uses the same (more or less) tags to express something, they would be much more useful in the future.

Don't hesitate to add your ideas here, we'll dig through and clean up this page later if it becomes messy. Let every idea be known now, before the database if filled with ten kinds of different "i-own-this" tags.

Generic ideas

  • Tags should be always singular, except where the plural is clearly different. (Eg, if you tag and album with some property of the tracks, don't use a plural. Example: instrumental and remix, not instrumentals and remixes.)
  • Accordingly, minimize any other grammar features. Don't use a genitive 's' if you don't really need to. (Eg. Metallica not Metallica's, if you want to associate something with that band.)
  • Try to make every tag as brief as possible, and document here tags that you think are useful.

Collection-related

Tags that are useful to describe ownership of the music. These might be useful in tracking who owns a certain release, for example to ask them to check a detail on the track-list. Other uses might be suggested.

  • owned – put this tag on albums that you own. Can also be put on individual tracks if you don't own the whole album (eg, tracks from iTunes).
  • wanted – add this to releases you want; someone might offer to sell you a copy, etc.

I was also considering things like "owned-digital", "owned-vinyl", "owned-cd", "owned-vinyl-unopened", to help collectors, but I'm afraid it might fragment/crowd the tag space. (Searching for "owned" won't retrieve "owned-vinyl", though technically it should. Could the developers tell us what do they think of a namespace thing; currently ":" is not allowed in tags; could we have "owned:digital" appear each time I look at tag "owned", but not at "digital"? Like a sort of prefix search. It would allow a lot of fun things. Of course, then there's feature creep, we might get to atrocities like "owned:(cd|vinyl:((95rmp&mint)|scratched)|cassette)", which would match searches for "owned", "owned:cd", "owned:vinyl", "owned:vinyl:mint", "owned:vinyl:95rpm", "owned:vinyl:95rpm&mint", "owned:vinyl:mint&95rpm", "owned:vinyl:scratched" (but not "owned:vinyl:good" nor "owned:vinyl:95rm&scratched") and "owned:cassette". But just a colon would be enough for 95% of the usage stuff.)

How much you like things

People might want to rate records, so I suggest a "standard" scale. Remember, the rating themselves are subjective, it's just nice to have a common scale (so you don't have to wonder if "rated-5" means that I like it or I hate it). Several suggestions:

  • I'm not sure this is a good idea to use tags for rating: RatingSystem, once finished, should be used for that. -- murdos 12:50, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

Amarok's idea:

This one is nice because it's one-to-ten scale, and it's somewhat descriptive. This means (a) one can approximate the rating at once, without knowing the scale, and (b) having descriptions can help users to decide how much they like something. In contrast, an abstract number is harder to decide on. The bad part is that it's not intrinsically sorted, harder to make math on (of course, it can be easily converted to numbers), and you need to consult the list to remember less-often-used values.

  1. awful
  2. barely tolerable
  3. tolerable
  4. okay
  5. good
  6. very good
  7. excellent
  8. amazing
  9. favorite

Numeric rating:

Just label everything rating-1 to rating-10. Good thing is that it's immediately obvious, relatively easy to sort (except that nasty 1/10/2 thing), easy to remember. The bad parts are the opposites of those above. The worst of these is IMO the fact that it's not really clear what "rated-5" means; the difference between "okay" and "amazing" is relatively clear for any two people, but a 5-out-of-10 rating may mean good for some people but awful for others.

Also, I foresee flamewars on "should we have 10-points ratings, or 5-stars ratings"? BTW, this can work with "1-star",... "5-star", except that "." isn't allowed in tags, so we can't have "1.5 star", which I use a lot in Amarok.

This numeric stuff is also prone to people tagging stuff as "1000-star" or whatever, which might seem cute but it's actually unhelpful because it dilutes the tag pool. We could use something like "rated-A" through "rated-J", with the unfortunate problem that (a) we'll argue about how many letters to use, (b) when we're done arguing, new users will need to check it here to know the limits.

Artists

Not much here, but I was thinking about tagging artists by what they (usually) do. For instance, Bruce Dickinson is mostly a vocalist, but Slash is mostly a guitarist. Many modern artists (like those mentioned before) compose/write lyrics for their bands' albums, which is reflected on their "appears on" pages, but they're not composers. Only classical-like composers would be tagged composer. Also, although I'm sure Mozart was an excellent pianist (and more), he would be tagged primarily composer. Someone like Richard Clayderman might have composed some pieces (don't know), but he would be primarily a pianist. Disputes could be solved by tag frequency.

What do you guys think?

  • Tags could be used to replace InternationalArtists by using tags "french", "german", "dutch", ... -- murdos 12:50, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

Genres

This is too much for this page, I'm sure the wiki will bloom with detailed multi-page hierarchies of stuff. But it might be nice establish some informal guidelines, in the interest of consistency. Things like separators–"death-metal" or "death metal", etc.

Some things might be easier to standardize than other. For instance, the song tag metal ballad might be relatively easy to agree on. Artist tags like baroque and neo-classical might be easy to add to some artists (and a relatively small and sane hierarchy built; please link it here if you create one). Things like fugue and allegro, and other many classical terms are probably much easier to define and agree on (among those in the know) than things like "melodic death metal ballad"...

Others

What else do you think tags would be useful for?

  • instrumental – for instrumental tracks or releases -- OutsideContext

Discussion

Tags should be always singular

Personally I prefer to tag a band like 'Me First and the Gimme Gimmes' with 'covers' instead of 'cover' since they only make covers, the band itself isn't a cover. Because of this saying that tags should always be singular is not sufficient imho -- Prodoc 11:54, 16 October 2007 (UTC)