choosing tags not very helpful

Question

When I ask a question and am asked to choose a tag, the interface is very unhelpful.

There are tons of tags, and the only way I can pick which ones to choose from is to start typing something in and hope the auto-suggest comes up with a suggestion. I also have no way of knowing if there is another tag that I should also be using.

I think it would be a lot more useful if, after one tag is chosen, a list of tags that have been used together with that is displayed. That way I can know what other tags to add to my question.

I know there is a link to frequently used tabs, but that opens on a different page and doesn't display which tags are used together.

Answer 1

I'm all for introducing a little AI into our lives, but I foresee a couple issues with the tag predicting model.

• It would only kick in after the first tag is input, in which case the problem (of not knowing what tags are available/appropriate) would already have been overcome to some extent.

• To avoid the above, it would have to start reading the contents of the question for either "buzzwords" or co-occurrences with specific tags, which could be quite non-trivial to implement. (Maybe relevance judgments based on co-occurrence of words in the tag wiki would help?)

• Unless one started with the most specific of the set of appropriate tags, prediction might do little good. Imagine for example a person asked a question about whether a kohen may put on the special garments for warmth. If the asker began with the obvious halacha-jewish-law it would most likely suggest things like shabbat and tefila-prayer, which are very common, but not kohen and meila which are much less common but more relevant.

• Alternatively, a pop-up with a listing of all available tags would probably be very unwieldy.

Answer 2

I for one think this is a wonderful idea and can think of many ways to implement it.

• Populate with tags from 'similar questions'

• Populate with tags which that word is found in the question.

• Populate with tags based on the current most popular tags as a question. "Is your question about Shabbat? Enter that tag or choose another one."

Answer 3

It looks like you're trying to get a feature request implemented. You should totally drop that and try jQuery. ;)

I've written a script (instructions) that suggests tags for you! You can get suggestions based on any tags you've already supplied, or based on any tags that similar questions use. (Suggesting based on already supplied tags will only return tag suggestions that are related to all of the tags. It's pretty limited that way.)

The first method works by making an API call to find out what tags are related to yours. The second method works by scanning the page for related questions. On the Ask page, these are the questions that pop up underneath your title. When editing tags, these are the questions in the "Related" sidebar. Once it has these questions, it makes an API call to find their tags, and displays the tags sorted according to which are most common among the related questions. (There's a special case for the /posts/<id>/edit page. There it uses a different API call to find the posts related questions' tags.

It works when asking questions, when editing questions, and, for 10kers, even when retagging questions (yay!).

Fair warning, API calls are rate limited, so if you use this too many times a day (like 10,000) it may stop working. Mashing the Suggest links won't work though, there's some caching. Sorry. ;)

---

Screenshots:

---