(Submitted at five seconds of the deadline!)
Abstract: I will introduce several features to enable communities of users to create and manage categories directly. Users will be able to vote to combine terms or to move terms under one another in a hierarchy.
Current category systems for content management systems, including Drupal, are limited to two basic types: hierarchies created by site administrators, which typically prove less-than-relevant or restrictive to the using community, and free-tagging, or folksonomies, which quickly grow to 100s or 1000s of terms.
Detail:
Community categorization, or advanced folksonomy, will enable users to vote to combine terms or to move terms under one another in a hierarchy. This vote will be first-come first serve unless it proves contentious, and then will be put to a "jury."
Participants ourselves -- all of us -- need to be the ones to decide, collectively, how our communications should be categorized.
It will provide for a quick veto of categories deemed too general (or a layer above the usually assigned).
Initial investigation suggests that community-managed categories will be possible with a contributed module and no need to modify core. Taxonomy provides for synonyms and other useful capabilities to this module that are not yet used.
Profit for Drupal
- A unique, powerful community tool.
- Relieve administrators from guessing at what categories should be before
- Unleash the flexibility of the content management system
Profit for People
- An important piece in enabling people to participate fully in all aspects of a site: submit content, rate content, and now organize content more powerfully than ever before.
Success Criteria
- Create the module described above.
- If patches to core prove necessary, provide patches to core that are accepted.
- Assist and troubleshoot the use of the module on at least two live, community sites.
Roadmap
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Publish goals on Drupal.org and appropriate groups.drupal.org and mailing lists for feedback and suggestions. Increase familiarity with necessary Drupal internals (already started until the start of June).
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Create a Drupal.org CVS project. Implement features in the order they are specified above. (until beginning or mid of August)
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Setup a test site and test all features with the help of the Drupal community. This will begin as soon as the first feature is usable and will be completed by the end of August.
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Upload distribution-ready code to Google. Publicize the module on Drupal.org.
Comments
Hey Benjamin, that sounds
Hey Benjamin,
that sounds like a great proposal!
It's a feature that I think would be greatly appreciated!
I personally always hated the twist that exists between the too unflexible, fixed taxonomies, and the often too free, too unstructred free tagging/folksonomies. This module could fill exactly this gap, which would be amazing!
You might want to have a look at the community_tags module and the tagging modules (part of wikitools if I remember correctly), which both provide basic functionality to make posts taggable by the community.
Thanks Frando! my proposal reviewer suggested community_tags too
Apparently I wasn't clear enough that I mean to build on community tagging functionality, not recreate it. It's getting the community into administering taxonomy that is the innovation.
~ ben melançon
member, Agaric Design Collective
http://AgaricDesign.com - "Open Source Web Development"
benjamin, agaric
I totally agree that it's
I totally agree that it's really hard to decide on categories before we have content. And it's also difficult to reorganize content later. Starting with less categories or no at all and evolve them with the community and having "trusted" users to do more decisions about site structure themselves in a democratic manner would be really a great choice! Adding related terms would allow more flexibility later, leaving old categories intact. I would highly appreciate it that related terms creation will integrate nicely with pathauto.
I'm really curious about this new upcoming module. I think there is a great need for such functionality!
schnizZzla
BerlinerStrassen.com
- Support Your Local Heroes!
That's simply fantastic!!!
Such a module would be more than wanted. It would be completely perfect to use on my web site - it's just what I need!
Can't wait to see this module coming up!