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I am not enamored of tags, because tag systems break down when humans get involved. The same person will choose different sets of tags for the same file, when

by dsr_ 4y ago

I am not enamored of tags, because tag systems break down when humans get involved. The same person will choose different sets of tags for the same file, when asked on different days; they will end up with synonymous tags that should be coalesced, but nobody wants to do that drudgework. The semantics of each tag will alter over time and by person. An optimal tag system is inferior to a full text search system with an indexer that recommends keywords and has a reasonable syntax for includes, excludes, and boolean logic.

valenterry 4y ago
That does not really speak against tags in general. You can also predefine tags for instance.
Joker_vD 4y ago
While I absolutely agree with the downsides you mention in the 2nd and 3rd paragraphs, the first paragraph is kinda trivial: all systems break down when humans get involved. As for the last one... what about images? People tag them too, and no "full text search system" exist for them unless you count "textual inversion"/"interrogate CLIP" which would still requires quite some hefty amount of manual tagging for the initial training.
cptcobalt 4y ago
This is exactly what the tag alias system of AO3—as discussed on this page—is designed to mitigate. If you've spent any amount of time on that website, you'll realize their tag system works really, really well.
- dsr_ 4y ago
  I've seen it. Their tag system relies on a large group of volunteers to reconcile the problems, and all the volunteers abiding by a large set of rules: https://archiveofourown.org/wrangling_guidelines/11 https://archiveofourown.org/wrangling_guidelines/11
twic 4y ago
The way i would frame this is that tag systems have a steep return on effort expended. Low-effort tagging is garbage, as you have observed. But when users stay on top of it for some reason, it can be extremely valuable. Someone else mentioned the example of AO3 here.
joshu 4y ago
tagging wasn't meant as a way to organize information for other people. it was meant as a way to augment retrieval. however, your suggested search system doesn't work - many people built these and they weren't right - because they don't encode whether or not the object had attention.
mjrpes 4y ago
> I am not enamored of tags, because tag systems break down when humans get involved. One of the things I'm curious to try out with GPT is auto tagging content and patching documents that have missing tags. You train GPT with your corpus and existing (and incomplete) tagging system, and have GPT fill in missing tags and revise tags that are synonymous or spelling variants. Maybe there are already good non-AI system that do this, I haven't really looked deeply into other solutions yet.

by dsr_ 4y ago

valenterry 4y ago

That does not really speak against tags in general. You can also predefine tags for instance.

Joker_vD 4y ago

While I absolutely agree with the downsides you mention in the 2nd and 3rd paragraphs, the first paragraph is kinda trivial: all systems break down when humans get involved. As for the last one... what about images? People tag them too, and no "full text search system" exist for them unless you count "textual inversion"/"interrogate CLIP" which would still requires quite some hefty amount of manual tagging for the initial training.

cptcobalt 4y ago

This is exactly what the tag alias system of AO3—as discussed on this page—is designed to mitigate. If you've spent any amount of time on that website, you'll realize their tag system works really, really well.

dsr_ 4y ago
I've seen it. Their tag system relies on a large group of volunteers to reconcile the problems, and all the volunteers abiding by a large set of rules: https://archiveofourown.org/wrangling_guidelines/11 https://archiveofourown.org/wrangling_guidelines/11

twic 4y ago

The way i would frame this is that tag systems have a steep return on effort expended. Low-effort tagging is garbage, as you have observed. But when users stay on top of it for some reason, it can be extremely valuable. Someone else mentioned the example of AO3 here.

joshu 4y ago

tagging wasn't meant as a way to organize information for other people. it was meant as a way to augment retrieval. however, your suggested search system doesn't work - many people built these and they weren't right - because they don't encode whether or not the object had attention.

mjrpes 4y ago

> I am not enamored of tags, because tag systems break down when humans get involved. One of the things I'm curious to try out with GPT is auto tagging content and patching documents that have missing tags. You train GPT with your corpus and existing (and incomplete) tagging system, and have GPT fill in missing tags and revise tags that are synonymous or spelling variants. Maybe there are already good non-AI system that do this, I haven't really looked deeply into other solutions yet.