Talking about Tags

Question

What should be the wording of tags we are using for the Joomla StackExchange?

I saw tags like "jdatabase" and "mysql" for a generic SQL Query question.

In my opinion it should be "database" and "sql" because its generic for all sql implementations and on Joomla StackExchange we are only talking about JDatabase or JDatabaseQuery.

Is this a good style or a bad one?

Answer 1

I can think of cases where both database and jdatabase would be appropriate.

If a question is about a more general database question (maybe "how to join content data with data from my custom table"), that should be tagged just database.

If you are specifically asking about working with the JDatabase or JDatabaseQuery classes, then tagging those specifically as well as tagging database may be a good option. I could see myself looking for JDatabaseQuery tags specifically as a way to provide more developer and coding focused answers than looking at more database architecture questions.

Answer 2

We shouldn't forget that tags can have synonyms too. While not directly applicable to the orginal database vs. jdatabase example, it might be appropriate for database to be a synonym for mysql or postgres.

Answer 3

IMO the number of tags shouldn't be too big to start with. We won't reach StackOverflow proportions any time soon and having many closely related but distinct tags makes it much harder to follow the questions I care about.

Given the example in the question, I think database should be used for any question related to accessing databases trough Joomla. Tags like mysql are fine for questions related to a specific engine. Otherwise MS SQL and Postgres would probably get lost.

Answer 4

In the blog post The 7 Essential Meta Questions of Every Beta the following describe the situation the best.

Proper tagging is very much a lead-by-example activity. The sooner you get the “community standards” for tagging ironed out, the less chance you’ll have to face the drudgery of cleaning them up later.

So tag your questions as best as you can. If you see questions poorly tagged, feel free to edit them.

In the end it's an organic way so it's hard to predict without having some real data. See popular tags.

Answer 5

It should really be whatever makes it easiest to search. I think it can be somewhat organic at first, and then add suggested tags. Not 100% on that though.

Answer 6

The problem with tagging a class name is trying to follow all those tags. "Database" is ok because that should be about general database problems. However, I'd rather see "JDatabase" or "JInput" tagged as "joomla-platform" and things like the DI package tagged as "joomla-framework" rather than the package or class name (or at the very least, include them as a catch-all that people can follow).