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Comment by porker | Hacker News Reader

> Usually, all of these conditions together are only found in highly niche and specialized forums that care a lot about the quality of their content.

Ooh do any of these still exist? If you know of any I'd love the links to look at how they're doing.

I was an inveterate tagger, debating taxonomies and ontologies late into the night (I have now forgotten the difference between the two!) and tried to run a curated forum. Eventually I gave up for most of the reasons you highlight - but mainly because I realised no one was as OCD about classification as I was.

In another life I would have run and catalogued a university library.

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Stack Overflow exhibits (or exhibited) all the points that parent mentioned. If you look at [the discussion of tags on the Meta site][0], and especially what's called ["burnination"][1] you'll see these issues being hashed out over time.

To sustain a tagging system like that it takes dedicated and invested individuals, and the corollary of that is that such people tend to generate a lot of discussion.

[0]:https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/tags [1]:https://meta.stackoverflow.com/tags/burninate-request/info

The social cataloging site Rate Your Music has a very in-depth genre tagging system. For each album and track, users debate and vote on which primary genres and secondary genres apply. For example Radiohead's OK Computer has Alternative Rock and Art Rock primary genres and a highly controversial Space Rock Revival secondary.

Each genre has a lineage of parent genres so each release tagged with a genre must also be a part of each parent genre. For example: Electronic > Electronic Dance Music > House > Tribal House. Also: Rock > Metal > Thrash Metal > Technical Thrash Metal.

There's a queue for submitting proposals for new genres and modifying the definitions of existing ones. There's also a complex chart system for filtering releases by genres, types, and descriptors. I think I last heard there were ~1300 music genres on the site.

Some good examples have been posted prior to my reply here --- I'll reiterate Archive of our Own (fanfiction) and Danbooru (anime porn) as two fairly big sites with well-maintained tagging systems.

Both sites have abundant guides and documentation about their systems and it's very interesting to see how they manage the real-world complexity of their domains.

Here are some good entry points if you're interested:

Archive of Our Own:

https://archiveofourown.org/faq/tags?language_id=en

https://archiveofourown.org/wrangling_guidelines/2

Danbooru: (linked pages are text-only, but individual tag pages, as well as the rest of the site, can be highly NSFW)

https://danbooru.donmai.us/wiki_pages/howto%3Atag

https://danbooru.donmai.us/forum_topics?search%5Bcategory_id...

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