Tagging: All About It, Mostly

[eponymous]

It was suggested that we work on having a comprehensive, structured tagging system here--and I couldn't agree more with that idea. Tags make it easier for people to browse the community and find the content that they are interested in.

When talking about a work, it should be tagged to account for Author and Artist, Title, and Publisher. I'm setting up the format for these as such:

a: is for author and artist.
Why do it this way? Because some comics have the same author (writer) and artist (illustrator). To streamline things I want to just use the "a:" prefix on a tag to denote both.

Next, the author/artist should be listed last name-first name.

So, for example, a proper tag for an author or artist should look like this: a: abel-jessica.

t: is for title.
A title may refer to graphic novels *OR* serial comics. Why do it this way? The first example I could think of was Watchmen, which was originally published in serial format, but which many people were introduced to as a "graphic novel" when the work was collected and bound into a single volume. In order to make this community friendly to novice comics fans, I want to keep this simplified.

Next, if a title begins with the articles "a," "an," or "the" drop the article. For example, The X-Men would be t: x-men. Now... here's something that I've been thinking over and trying to formulate the best way to work it... what about a situation such as The Amazing Spider-Man, The Spectacular Spider-Man, and Ultimate Spider-Man? My trial method of tagging is as follows: t: spiderman-amazing, t: spiderman-spectacular, t: spiderman-ultimate.
(if this proves to be too complicated, it can be amended.)

p: is for publisher.
Why have a tag for publishers? Because some people are loyal to certain publishers, or perhaps interested in learning about what sorts of works are being produced by certain companies.

To tag a publisher, use the format p: dc comics, for example.
Now, if it's a label under a publisher, such as Vertigo Comics, use the format: p: dc comics-vertigo comics.

Other Types of Tags
comm: is for administrative types of posts, and posts dealing with issues of the community, rather than comics. There will be a few different types of suffixes for these types of tags, such as comm: guidelines

awards: is for discussing comics awards. From time to time we may want to talk about the recipients or nominees for a particular award. The awards prefix should be followed by the name of the award, such as awards: eisner award

... This post will quite possibly grow and change as the needs of the community grow and change. Or, as suggestions for improvement are made. Are there other types of tags that people think are needed? Comment here with any feedback on the system. Thanks.

Comments

[zetta]

We'll need a resources tag for the retailers and faqs and what not. And I'm guessing we'll want to differentiate from reviews and discussion posts.

[elfy]

i'm in germany and often read german comics. nevertheless i might want to recommend one or the other - do i have to look up the US publisher of said comic or should i tag with the german one?

[bliumchik]

I feel like doing stuff like dividing Spiderman by universe would cause confusion for people looking for posts on a) ANY spiderman canon, b) MULTIPLE spiderman canons or c) a discussion of Spiderman as an archetype not necessarily specific to a continuity.

On the other hand, if someone WAS looking for a very specific continuity that isn't talked about as often as some others, they might have trouble wading through the deluge of irrelevant entries once we've developed a bit of a history.

Some possible solutions: having t:spiderman AND t:spiderman-amazing etc, OR having t:spiderman-amazing and c for character:spiderman (scans_daily's example shows there was some confusion over whether to put spiderman or peter parker, though), OR I think there's a way to split the tags so that if you had tags spiderman:amazing and spiderman:616, the taglist would show spiderman, and then all the subheadings indented, so you could click one of them or just click spiderman and get all of them.

In any case, to prevent another of scans_daily's terminal issues, I think you should put a note in the profile/rules to say that tagging should ideally be done post entry creation by clicking edit tags and selecting the right ones from the list. That way we know everyone talking about one thing will be using the same tags even if the tag is long-disused.

That might bring up its own problems, but I can tell you that without it the mods will be constantly re-tagging things for people who've written peterparker instead of peter parker, or what have you.

[bliumchik]

Also, tags for webcomics y/n?