Taxonomy module terminology

+1

Huge +1 from me. I like the idea someone on the list had about playing this up as a "what we do better" thing rather than apologizing for being confusing.

Michelle

" Manage tagging and advanced classification of your content"

How about

"Manage tagging, categorizing, and advanced classification of your content"

Just to hit the "categories" name as well.

Sorry for messing up the settings. I had to take care of the baby in the middle of replying.

Michelle

If it gets this fixed, spam away. :)

"Tagging, categorization, and advanced classification of your content."

The words aren't matching up there. I'm not sure what the proper grammer term is, but I'm thinking we should either have

"Tags, categorization, and advanced classification of your content."

or

"Tagging, categorizing, and advanced classifying of your content."

The first one switches between tagging, which is an action, and the others which are things. Does that make sense?

Michelle

Discuss the help text here, it needs updating anyway: http://groups.drupal.org/node/7132

Getting rid of the term category in favour of taxonomy is very sensible, as it takes one word out of the system.

One further thought: could another word be removed by replacing the word "vocabulary" with "taxonomy"? To me, a vocabulary implies a list of keywords, whereas the hierarchical structure that can be created in what is now called a "vocabulary" is actually a "taxonomy" itself. One could see a "vocabulary" as a special case of a "taxonomy". This is clearly a change beyond the scope of this patch, so perhaps if people feel that this is worth discussing, a separate issue should be started.

catch: In your scheme, there is only one taxonomy per website, and the word "taxonomy" is not used in the sense of a single hierarchy, which is my understanding of the word, and similar to that of Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxonomy):

The term taxonomy may also apply to relationship schemes other than parent-child hierarchies, such as network structures with other types of relationships. Taxonomies may include single children with multi-parents, for example, "Car" might appear with both parents "Vehicle" and "Steel Mechanisms"; to some however, this merely means that 'car' is a part of several different taxonomies.

A taxonomy might also be a simple organization of kinds of things into groups, or even an alphabetical list. However, the term vocabulary is more appropriate for such a list. In current usage within "Knowledge Management", taxonomies are seen as less broad than ontologies as ontologies apply a larger variety of relation types.

I think it would be possible to rephrase your previous comment, without the word "vocabulary":

For me the issue is that one site could include three completely different taxonomies:

Cars
Colours
Fruit

One content type could have Cars and Colours enabled, the other content type could have Fruit and Colours enabled. In my mind this is one site with multiple taxonomies.

However, I do take the point that there has to be a good reason for changing terminology, and exisisting users are quite used to the term "vocabulary". It's just that initially I found it to be a confusing term. And the point has been made in the mailing list, that there would be a major challenge in migrating URLs, such as to what I'd regard as the more logical structure of:
taxonomy/1 (instead of vocabulary/1)
taxonomies/term/4 (instead of taxonomy/term/4)

I must say as an English english speaker I am opposed to the American use of the letter 'z' instead of 's' in all words. I know it is a small thing and in a lot of cases we just have to let it go due to weight of numbers, but for any english speaker who isn't North American these words just 'look wrong'. If there is a better alternative can we please use it.

@ac: We can fight core's use of US vs. UK English in another issue; for now, US English is consistent with the rest of core, so this patch should be as well. Luckily, Drupal 6 includes a handy "locale lite" feature so you can include an array in settings.php to easily fix these one-off strings to match your dialect of choice.

No time to properly review what's here, but huge, flaming, blinking, somersaulting +1 to the change back to "Taxonomy." Ever since we did the "Categories" switch, it has done nothing but confuse people. Next target: turning all those silly "posts" back into "nodes," but I digress. ;)

Fair enough. Can't wait for 'local lite'. Now all we need to do is get the CSS spec revised to change 'color' to 'colour' :D

This is an absurdly bad solution to an acknowledged problem. Go forward, not backward.

Five Steps to a Solution
1. Stop whatever you are doing.
2. Slap yourself in the face.
3. Re-read Chris Messina's review.
4. Re-read Dries' dev list remarks.
5. Propose a worthwhile improvement that increases usability.

Brainstorming of Issues
1. Taxonomy
A. English speakers do not regularly use or understand the word "taxonomy"; it should be avoided wherever possible in Drupal.
B. "Taxonomy" is largely equivalent to: classification, ontology [yes, a word even worse than "taxonomy"], categorization, organization, etc.
2. Vocabulary
A. English speakers do not regularly use or understand the word "vocabulary" in any sense other than one's use of words in a given language; it should be avoided wherever possible in Drupal.
B. "Vocabulary" is largely equivalent to: category, order, group, set, division, class, structure, cluster, hierarchy, tree, graph, network, etc.
3. Term
A. "Term" isn't terrible but is also used rarely in English; when it is used, "term" frequently signifies time rather than an element.
B. "Term" is largely equivalent to: tag, label, node [this goes to show how undistinctive, i.e. useless, "node" is], mnemonic, key, keyword, element, item, designation, etc.

Principles of Assessment
1. What is most intuitive to the beginning user?
2. Intermediate and expert users will adapt to any terminology that labels a set of features and is sufficiently described or discoverable, but for beginners the terminology is very important to the learning curve.
3. Don't worry about the exact definitions for any particular word: worry about perception, first impressions, and standard practice.

Let's Look to History (aka, there is nothing new under the sun)
* Initial creation of taxonomy.module (Apr. 2002)
* Should we rename "taxnomy" to "classification"? (Jun. 2003)
* Renamed 'taxonomy' menu to 'categories' for sake of usability. (Apr. 2004)
* Proposal: merge book and taxonomy modules (May 2005)
* Drupal terminology suggestions (Feb. 2006)

Term:

For what is called a term, "Label" would be a neutral and intuitive word that applies both to free tags and fixed categories. "Category" sounds odd for free tags, and there are uses for the fixed hierarchical organization where "tag" would just seem out of place. Splitting up the terminology between free-tagging and fixed (as suggested by Chris) seems overkill when a neutral word can suffice. Labels are used in email clients, in photo albums, in Gmail, in various Web 2.0 sites, so they're familiar. So "Label" +1 here.

Vocabulary:

No strong opinion; I like all of the synonyms suggested in #20. It should be a word that avoids confusion with "Label", and shouldn't even be confused with a kind of "Top level label". In a fixed, singular hierarchy (like biological species), no level of the hierarchy is equivalent to a vocabulary. Every species is in exactly one class on each level. If "Plants" and "Animals" were each vocabularies, that would give every species both a plant and an animal classification.

In fact, the biological taxonomy as a whole forms a single vocabulary, which is why I am close to suggesting a vocabulary to be renamed "taxonomy" or a close synonym thereof (assuming we free that word, of course). The meaning is far closer: A node can be categorized by any of several taxonomies, which are completely independent - for example, a species could be categorized in a geographical hierarchy by habitat as well as a biological one. The only counter-argument is "taxonomy" sounding too scientific. "Hierarchy", maybe?

Taxonomy: Don't know. Structure, classification, organization, any of ChrisKennedy's suggestions sounded good.

+1 to renaming 'Categories' to 'Taxonomy' for the time being.

One minor note:

-    'title' => 'Categories',
-    'description' => 'Create vocabularies and terms to categorize your content.',
+    'title' => 'Taxonomy',
+    'description' => 'Tags, categorization, and advanced classification of your content.',

"Tags, categorization, and advanced classification of your content." is

• not parallel with the majority of other descriptions on the admin page, which, for the most part, start with verbs like "Create", "Control", "Manage", "Translate", etc.
• depending on how you read it: a *thing*, a *thing*, and *doing a thing*, which could be confusing.

Thanks catch!

"Create hierarchies and labels to categorize your content"?

The concept of a "vocabulary" seems to be tricky to grasp or put in adequate words. "Super category" or "Category group" just highlights the ease with which it is confused with a "term": Any term can be a "super-category" or "group" if it has children. What is the difference between having a single vocabulary with several root terms with children, and having each of those root terms as a vocabulary itself?

The first approach treats these root terms as exchangeable alternatives. If multiples aren't allowed, the content can only add one of them; if the vocabulary is marked required, the content has to add at least one of them.

The second structure treats them as completely independent from each other. Depending on settings, it is possible to require the user to enter at least/at most one term in each group.

I think "hierarchy" is the best option there, even if it sounds odd for the free-tagging vocabularies... unless the interface should be split up to allow adding either a new "Hierarchy" or a new "Free-tagging vocabulary"? Note that #192242 would free up the word "hierarchy" by renaming it to "term structure" where it is already used.

How about "Manage tagging, categorization, and classification of your content." (see attached patch)

Each part of the sentence would read properly as:

"Manage [something] of your content"

("Manage [tags] of your content" from above didn't read quite right to me)

And we use US English in interface strings, so it's categoriZation. Sorry, UK/Canada/Australia. :(

Are we changing the terminology everywhere? For example, categories is still used in the function taxonomy_render_nodes when there are no posts for a term. Or, we use the word category in taxonomy_hook_info. Oh, and the function taxonomy_rss_item.

I can imagine updating taxonomy_hook_info, but do we update the visitor facing other ones?

I'll ask Chris Messina to comment on this. Then, we know what he thinks or what he doesn't think. :)

This is my thought. Regardless of what Chris Messina thinks or doesn't think. ;) Take it for what it's worth.

"Taxonomy" is a perfectly valid English word for describing the functionality that Drupal gives you. Calling it "Categories" is a bug, period.

Taxonomy is not a word that most people use on a daily basis, granted, but it's something that can be looked up in a dictionary, unlike words like "node" or "form API" which are "Drupalisms." At Lullabot, we work with a number of large-scale clients, and the phrase "Drupal was the only open source CMS with a taxonomy system, so that's why we chose it" comes up far more often than you'd probably think. The taxonomy system is a unique feature of Drupal that is way ahead of its time, and we should be celebrating it, not trying to "dumb it down."

Now. Our end user market is clearly equally (if not more so) important than our "big-name, high-profile website" market. And we shouldn't make Drupal more confusing just so that "power users" have the airplane cockpit of options that they need.

I think there are two ways we should address this:
a) Improving the taxonomy UI, so that it's easier to do common tasks that you do all the time, and the more common options are more obvious.
b) Include install profiles that setup common vocabularies such as "Tags" and "Forums" with some sample data in it already. This both helps eliminate tedious setup that people tend to do on all sites, and also *educates* people on what those obscure terms like "Vocabularies" and "Terms" mean, by example.

Oh, also, Nate brought up last night that WordPress 2.3 now has "Taxonomy" as well. So there you go. One way or another, bloggers will be dragged kicking and screaming to the world of richer content classification. ;)

OK, this is all constructive input and I'm buying it. ;-)

However, are there any other things we can do to make the configuration screens a bit more intuitive?

For example, I had two technically-savy people e-mail me because they couldn't figure out how to setup tags for blog posts. See http://dag.wieers.com/blog/content/first-impressions-drupal : "Another thing I still haven't grasped is how I ought to use Categories/Keywords to tag my Blog entries. I don't think what I do now is correct.". Changing the terminology only goes so far. The real problem is that people don't know how to setup simple tags ...

Let's not blind-stare at the terminology. As I said in my DrupalCon presentation in Barcelona: "lipstick on a pig doesn't cut it".

Rather than a whole install profile that then has to be maintained, what about an option in the normal installer to set up some basic taxonomy? Default it to unchecked for all the people that are familiar with taxonomy and won't need it but then it's there for the newbies.

Michelle

catch, good point and thanks for reminding me. This issue is RTBC then, I guess. I'm marking this RTBC but I'll leave some time for Chris to come back and comment.

Drats.

+1 for committing the latest patch in #32

IMHO, we should try to fix this issue ASAP - further improvements can still follow up.

Regarding a pointer to Wikipedia: Although Wikipedia URLs will probably work at any time, I'd vote against any external URL, because a D6 site can get really old and an external link may not work in the future. However, we could add that link to the d.o handbooks.

Um, if you think wikipedia URLs will work for a long time, then you vote against adding one? Further, what happens if you follow a link that has gone away? Nothing. We should refrain from educating thousands of site owners about taxonomy because a handful of them might encounter a 404 10 years from now? Lets be reasonable.

To clarify:

I'd vote against any external URL

If we add links to Wikipedia, someone could reasonably argue to add a pointer to whatever (www.example.com). URLs of external sites can change, so we should prevent any 404 in advance by directing users to drupal.org, where we are able to handle (and correct) wrong URLs properly - even if a page simply redirects users to Wikipedia (or whatever).

If we are going to link to any page on Taxonomy it should be a drupal.org page. This way we can, as sun put it, control the URL if it changes. And, we can add drupal specific documentation and examples.

Though, I'm not sure if the outside link is needed.

I committed the latest patch, to help people get rolling with the help text and interface improvements, as our time is quite short now. Thanks.

Trigger.module had some references that got missed.

Thanks, comitted.

I may be coming to this too late, so I apologize, if I'm just rehashing something also discussed elsewhere. I only just noticed the renaming of the Categories link to Taxonomy. In my view, this is a huge retrograde step in usability in an otherwise user-friendly release. The problem is that it does not flow with the mental processes of most website administrators (rather than developers) when they go to the Administer Content section. You do not go there to create a taxonomy but rather to create Categories. Once there, with a bit of effort, you can understand what vocabularies and terms are, although renaming those would be a worthwhile thing. But if you land on a page that's called Taxonomy, you have no contextual clues as to what vocabularies might be. Going to a dictionary, as webchick suggests, is not going to help all that much because the dictionary and encyclopedic definitions will not explain 'taxonomy' to a person who already doesn't know what it means (like my department's secretary) - see http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=define%3A+taxonomy or http://www.thefreedictionary.com/taxonomy.

The problem is that 'taxonomy' as it's usually used (in contrast to its etymology), is just fancy word for 'classification' which again is nothing more than a hierarchical system of discrete 'categories'. So even, if there are large companies that might like Drupal because of its 'taxonomy system', they will use the taxonomy module to create categories. And their webadmins will have one less thing to learn in addition to 'node'. I speak with a certain amount of expertise as a linguist who specializes in the study of categorization and I can assure you that no matter how much jargon we throw around, the job of the taxonomy module will be the creation and management of categories. And given that most people not only understand what a category is, but also might want to intuitively categorize their content, having a click path from Manage Content > Categories makes so much more sense than Manage Content > Taxonomy.

It is unfortunate, that developers need to navigate the difference between the taxonomy module and the creation of categories but developers are people who can learn one additional thing. But every single additional thing a site administrator needs to learn reduces usability significantly and there is (luckily) already so much to learn in Drupal.

PS: A note on Wordpress. I'm a long-time user of Wordpress and this latest introduction of taxonomy in addition to categories confused the hell out of me. Basically, if I understand correctly, it's just a free-tagging category. I'm all for educating users to explain a new concept that is necessary to understand how something works better but 'taxonomy' is not that. 'Categories' describes every aspect taxonomy suggests and its use in Drupal is only to indicate that it has more functionality than elsewhere. We can still use 'rich taxonomy' in marketing to corporate clients who hire people who track the buzz words but why ram it down the throat of my poor site admins who already have so much to deal with? It seems like a small thing but we're talking about roughly 30 minutes of training per person for just that one link change. It adds up!

As previously discussed, "taxonomy" is not a buzz word. Taxonomy allows to classify contents in hierarchical categories and/or tags. Please read the thread on the development list (first link in this issue) for further information.

I tried to go through as much of the discussion of Chris Mesinha's review as I could and was not convinced.

The problem is that for people who've used categories, tags seem to be something different and hierarchical categories with multiple parents even more so. But they really are all categories. They just aren't 'natural categories'. "Tom's wedding pics" looks very different from "Countries" or "Months" but it's doing exactly the same job. And if it is part of a hierarchy from Pics > Wedding pics > Tom's wedding pics, it's still doing nothing more than categorizing content (ask Aristotle). Drupal does this better than any other CMS so it may be worth calling the categorization system Taxonomy to differentiate it but it's still a type of categorization. Equally, if you use taxonomy to define 'sections' on your website, it may not seem like categorization but it 'really' is.

But that's neither here nor there. I just had a long discussion with our site maintainer who had problems with the whole 'taxonomy' - 'vocabulary' - 'term' thing and it wasn't pretty. Once I translated it into categories and sub-categories, the confusion was gone. The only saving grace so far, has been the fact that I could just email users the simple instruction "Click on the 'Categories' link" and if vocabularies had been set up, they could make some sort of sense of it. Now, I will have to do more work or install the locale module and replace the string. I just wanted to register an objection to this change and present some arguments. Now, I will shut up.

That is good news (I didn't realize that). In that case, I'm not all that bothered. My concern wasn't so much for people who install Drupal themselves but rather for the people who need to teach others how to administer it.

I agree with #52 by bohemicus. I also had a little discussion with catch lately about the terms 'Taxonomy', 'term' and 'vocabulary'. Although at the time he had me convinced those terms do the job very well, I am a little less convinced now, particularly when it comes to translating those terms. According to Wikipedia "Taxonomy is the practice and science of classification." and in a way using this name for the Drupal categorisation system makes perfect sense. On the other hand I have several reasons to object:

• Newcomers don't know what Taxonomy does and need to learn what 'terms' and 'vocabularies' are before they are able to use the module
• Drupal's being inconsistent with the rest of the internet as every CMS uses the term 'category'
• How do we translate it? At least in the Dutch translation I (among others) am working on we don't translate module names. As the Dutch word for 'taxonomy' is hardly known among the Dutch (ordinary people just don't use that term but another one) Taxonomy makes even less sense. I can imagine this is the case with other languages as well. 'Category' would be a more general term to translate. I believe most people who have English as a secondary language will also know what a category means in an instant.

It's not that I have the perfect solution, but I do want to make clear that in my opinion it would be wise to give those terms some thoughts and perhaps we should rename them. The best I can come up with now is 'category' for vocabularies and 'sub-category' for terms.

Forgot to change the settings...

Shouldn't further discussion be part of a new issue since this particular issue was fixed?

Your wish is my... whatever: #263301: Taxonomy module terminology part II

>> This is an absurdly bad solution to an acknowledged problem. Go forward, not backward.

AGREED!

Categorization >> Categories >> Tags makes a most sense to me as per the "What is most intuitive to beginning users?" principle even though "Categories" is not exactly equal to what is currently "Vocabularies" but I can't come up with a better term at the moment.

Um. Let's say you have the following, and for whatever reason are not using CCK fields for them:

Vocabulary 1: Color
- Red
- Yellow
- Green

Vocabulary 2: Size
- Small
- Medium
- Large

Calling the vocabulary a "category" really takes away meaning in that case. It's not as if an item can have either a size or a color - rather, the two are independent from each other. /Classification/ might be better - strictly speaking that's a synonym of "Taxonomy", but it does convey the right sense. You can create different classifications for your content (or aspects it will be categorized by), and each classification has different labels in it...

Depends on if we are looking for common use or pedantic use. I tend to think that "vocabulary" is not a term that the average person uses frequently and thus its use often confuses. I know most my clients don't get it. Unfortunate as it may be, software really should be designed for users.