What is a Tag?

Ask About The Mouse uses tags as an easy and informal way to group questions by topic. Because the concept of tagging may not be familiar, let's talk about why tags are useful and investigate some easy ways to use tags.

Why do we need tags?
Grouping similar things together is natural for people. It helps us get organized and find the things we need quickly and easily. In grade school, I'm sure many of us used binders to keep all of our science notes together and organized - but separate from the notes we needed for math class. This metaphor was extended to computers, where we organize files (like digital photos or emails) into folders for easy retrieval later.

Here's a simple example where this type of organizational method gets complicated. Let's say you wanted to ask a question about "dining in Epcot for someone with food allergies". In a traditional message board you might have to choose between several forum topic areas to ask this question. For example, there may be separate topic areas of the forum for "dining", "Epcot", and "special needs" discussions. Choosing the right place to ask your question from these options might not be obvious. One alternative would be to post the question in all three places and then manually combine the responses you get (although some sites frown on cross posting).

There are better ways to deal with this problem. One simple solution is to introduce the concept of tags.

What is a tag?
A tag is simply a category name to describe the question at a high level. Like a folder, the "tag category" will allow you to group similar questions together. Unlike folders, it's simple and intuitive to give an item multiple tags - allowing an question to fit into several topic areas at the same time. No need to post your question in multiple areas of the forum. No need to manually combine all the responses. All the information is stored in one easy to find location.

Defining a tag
When a question is asked, the asker specifies which "tag categories" the question covers. As the category tag name is entered, the system will suggest similar tags that already exist. If no suitable option is found, feel free to create an entirely new tag. Like questions however, please only define tags that you think will be helpful to at least one other person in finding your question.

Also, don't stress over picking the perfect set of tags. Remember, some aspects of the site are like a wiki and can be edited by the community . If a similar tag to one you've created already exists, someone in the community can retag (or extend) the tags you've provided to place the question into it's proper place.

Cool, what else should I know?
Once questions are tagged there are a bunch of useful things people can do

• Registered users can select a set of "interesting tags". Doing so will highlight questions with tags that match their interests.
  
• Tags can be combined to locate a very particular subset of questions. This could be useful in finding only the questions pertaining to "dining", "walt-disney-world", and "special needs" for instance.
  
• Many questions will be of little interest to some users. These users can select a set of "ignored tags" to sort of move these questions into the background.

I hope this simple introduction helps new users get started with tags.