Creating an orderly tagging structure

Question

Stack Overflow is a huge site. It gets about 3.4k questions a day. As such, people need to filter out questions by tags. Otherwise, they won't be able to find questions they can answer, or at the very least will waste a lot of time trying to find them. The traffic is just too great. For this reason, a solid taxonomy of tags is of a crucial importance.

Tags fall into one of two categories:

• Category tags: Tags people follow, the ones they use to find questions they can answer as expert. _{Examples: PHP, Java, C#, C++, JavaScript, Python, etc.}

• Supplementary tags: They're useful but only occasionally so, and usually only for search purposes.
  _{Examples: asynchronous, textbox, dynamic, etc.}

The scope of Skeptics.SE is huge; we cover nearly all pop science questions.

Like Stack Overflow, Skeptics.SE will need a strong taxonomy of category tags to increase the chance users find questions they can answer. Our category tags will have to be specific enough to be useful, to identify an interest, but broad enough so that one doesn't have to follow twenty tags to follow all the questions he's interested in.

Unlike Stack Overflow, that will be hard to achieve. Most of the category tags on SO are programming languages. Tagging a question about C# with [C#] is pretty intuitive. What do you tag a question about creationism with? Biology, creationism, evolution, religion and intelligent design all seem like good potential tags, but at which point does the tagging become redundant or overly broad? Let's not forget there's also a maximum of five tags we have to work with.

So, what should our category tags be?

Answer 1

For category tags to be useful, we need to be consistent in applying them. At the point where we have a few thousand questions it will be too late if they are used inconsistently.

I think the sciences, as Borror0 suggested, are a good start for tagging categories, but I think we need to expand on them.

Many subject will come up regularly and deserve their own tag like vaccines or homeopathy, those should be applied additionally to the category tag.

The following is an inital try to compose a list of categories for our existing questions. If there are subtags, the question should be tagged with the parent tag and the child tag.

Natural sciences

• biology
  • evolution and creationism/intelligent-design with evolution being the necessary tag, ID and creationism only when they are specifically the topic of the queston
• physics
• chemistry
• astronomy
• climatology
  • climate-change
• environment Environmental Science

Social sciences

• psychology
• history

Pseudosciences

• paranormal
• astrology

Medical/Health

• medicine anything about drugs, diseases ... (merge health into it)
  • alternative-medicine Overlaps with medicine, but is a pretty well defined sub-field
• nutrition

Other

• extinction-events We get a lot of question about those
• aliens
• technology

Answer 2

I suggest that all questions should be tagged with the field of science it belongs to: psychology questions get the psychology tag, questions which require knowledge of chemistry get the chemistry tag, etc.

I think we should make an exception for biology, though, since it's such a vast topic. A zoologist has very little in common with a microbiologist. Using each subfield (zoology, microbiology, abiogenesis, etc.) instead would be a better choice. Biology is too broad, in my opinion. Also, the tag doesn't need to be the field. Using [evolution] over [evolutionary-biology] might be advisable, for example.

Needless to say, some of the more established pseudosciences will get their own category tag. We shouldn't force astrology question onto people who follow the astronomy tags.

Answer 3

While it is good to put some thought into this, I would resist the temptation to over-engineer the whole thing. You'll inevitably spend a ton of time creating lots of tags that nobody will ever use. Keep in mind that this site, even if successful, is unlikely to reach the traffic levels seen on Stack Overflow.

Create a basic structure to cover the cases you know will be needed, and some rules of thumb for creating new ones. Beyond that, let the tag system grow organically and clean up periodically as needed.