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categories, tags or both? [closed]

When it comes to sorting contents, I always hesitate, typically I'll have categories and tags both as reasonable options, still I wonder when to use categories and when to use tags or even, when to use both? Categories looks simple and simpler to implement and tags provide much more flexibility but often appears to be too complex and affects usability. Think about del.icio.us for example, looking for content in thousands of tags is not an interesting thing. To this point I bet categories are actually more practical. Because like delicious what's really working is the hottest tags which I think, conceptually, are 'categories'.

I saw wordpress is using a general scheme to handle this. It implements a general taxonomy to deal with categories and tags in the same manner. It makes the implementation a bit more complicated tho.

I'd like to hear other people say about this. Thanks.

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Shawn Avatar asked Dec 28 '09 03:12

Shawn


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1 Answers

I'm not sure there's a single, correct answer to this.

Tags are a paradigm that imply overlap, while categories imply no overlap.

Categories (either as a flat list or hierarchy) have historically been most useful for organizing dozens or hundreds of entities.

Tags have historically handled hundreds of thousands of entities better.

Neither is more correct as a general rule.

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Drew Dormann Avatar answered Oct 05 '22 22:10

Drew Dormann