Sunday, November 23, 2008

Using Wikipedia as a source of canonical tagnames

Say you want to tag a blogpost as being about ten pin bowling. What name do you give the tag? Here's some possibilities:

tenpinbowling
bowling
ten_pin_bowling

As a convention, you could try to find a Wikipedia article for that subject, and use the name used in the article's URL.

In this case it's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten-pin_bowling

so you'd use the tagname

Ten-pin_bowling

a potential bonus is that you could have it create an automatic link to the Wikipedia article.

The idea of this Wikipedia tagname convention is to have a canonical source for tagnames. (and I suppose it would also help make the Wikipedia article the canonical source of basic information about a topic).

Having fewer different names for referring to the same thing ought to be useful, and make it easier to find all the different bits of information talking about the same thing.

By the way, you could also have tools that automatically suggest these tagnames. E.g. you could select the text in your blogpost that mentions ten pin bowling, and the tool could automatically search wikipedia, get the URLs of the articles matching, and present you with a list of potential tagnames.

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