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What tag hierarchy and ontology should Linguistics use?

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I was surprised with joy when I saw that Codidact allows tag hierarchies:

A tag can have one or more children, and when you search on a tag you can either search just that tag or also search its children. This gives communities another way to organize content.

This is extremely useful to properly categorize items: it is common in other communities that people tag with the specific concept, but then forget to add the general scope tag.

So what is the proposed ontology for the Languages & Linguistics site? I foresee a general set of tags for each language and then, eventually, specific tags for the rest.

But should we have general tags like grammar, pronunciation and so on? Should others like number be part of a bigger category, so we just have more general tags on the top level?

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So what is the proposed ontology for the Languages & Linguistics site? I foresee a category for each language and then, eventually, subcategories for the rest.

Just so we're on the same page, we don't have subcategories. Categories are what are listed here, i.e. Q&A, Resources, and Meta. I assume by categories, you mean having "special" top level[1] tags which are formatted differently like the top-level [discussion], [feature-request], etc. tags, and then having sub-tags of those. However, I'll first just address why language categories won't work.

If we did have categories for each language, this would pose a serious UI issue. As noted in comments on the original site proposal, creating a category for every language will make us quickly run out of space.

My primary concern here is that if we end up with 10+ categories, that poses both UI and UX challenges we did not plan for when designing categories. — Monica Cellio

Further, we also allow cross-language comparison questions, such as Is Swedish more conservative than Danish and Norwegians?, where it wouldn't fit in one language category anyway. And then we have questions about linguistics which may or may not be about specific languages, such as Why is linguistics limited in how much it can look back in time?. At some point, having multiple categories becomes more confusing than helpful.


On the other hand, I fully support the idea of having language tags have a special appearance/color[2]. Those tags are what make Languages & Linguistics, well, Languages & Linguistics, after all.

But should we have general tags like grammar, pronunciation and so on? Should others like number be part of a bigger category, so we just have more general categories?

(I am continuing to assume you mean top level tags, not categories.)

My rule of thumb for putting a tag as a sub-tag is "If you ask about <tag>, are you also asking about <other tag>?"[3] For example, if you ask about "Mandarin" are you also asking about "Chinese"? Yes, so [Mandarin] is a sub-tag of [Chinese].

By this criteria, what sort of tag would [number] be under? I can't really think of any tag that is 1. generic enough to encompass all usages of the [number] tag and 2. is not so generic that it isn't useless.

More to the point though, sub-tags are tags; there is no functional difference between them and top-level tags. Whether or not we decide to put [grammar], [pronunciation], or [number] under another more generic tag, they will still function exactly the same, so asking whether they should be under a more general tag is kind of moot; if there ends up being one, we can put them under it, but there's no reason to contrive one for the sake of creating a tag structure that doesn't do anything.


Ok, now that you've read (or skipped) that slog, what is the proposed ontology for the Languages & Linguistics community? The answer: We never (formally) decided on one. We started with Q&A and Meta (Resources came later), and just let the tag set grow to fit new questions.

And, speaking personally, I believe that this is likely the best option. If we find a problem with the tag hierarchy, we can always change it, so I think it's best to let it grow and structure itself naturally.


  1. That is, tags without a parent, AKA orphan tags. ↩︎

  2. I'd advocate for green, the same color as the site. ↩︎

  3. Or the other way around, "If you search for <tag>, do you also want everything tagged with <subtag>?" ↩︎

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