Arbital "tag" relationship

Tagging is one of the multiple ways to connect pages. This relationship type is used to indicate that one page is talking about another page: that the tagged page is talking about the tag. For example, a page titled “Bitcoin price will collapse by end of 2016” will have the “Bitcoin” tag. The tag is itself a page, in this case about Bitcoin.

There is also a set of meta tags that are used to highlight certain characteristics of the page, e.g. that it’s work in progress.

Arbital tags are different

Many content platforms have the concept of tags or #hashtags. E.g. on Twitter you can tweet something like: “Loved the new Star Wars movie! #maytheforcebewithyou”. This way people can make their tweet part of the broader discussion, and users can click on the hashtag to see what else people said on that topic. However, next time people talk about the movie, they might use a completely different hashtag, or not use a hashtag at all, so you might not be able to find those conversations easily, even if you are actively looking for them.

On Arbital, the tag is itself a page. So if you wrote a review of the movie, you’d tag it with the movie page. Then when people browse the movie page, they’ll see your review under the Related section. This allows the conversations to be lasting and easily findable. Even if the person didn’t add the appropriate tags, the community has the power to add them if the page is publicly editable.

When to create a tag

Add a tag for every core topic that the page is talking about. For example:

• A page talking about how Neo is not “The One” should have “The Matrix” and “Neo” as tags.

• If you are writing an analysis of Ernest Hemingway’s poetry, some tags will be: “Ernest Hemingway”, “Poetry”, “Lost generation”, and “1920s”, depending on which ones are important to your central point.

When not to create a tag

• Don’t add a tag if it’s already a parent or a child, since that would be redundant.

What’s the difference between a tag and a parent?

Parent-child relationship is much stronger. It implies that the pages can’t really be separated; the child is a critical component of the parent. E.g. a chapter is a child of the book, a research paper is a child of the journal(s) it’s published in, page about Addition is a child of Arithmetic. Tag relationship is more loose. The child is just talking about the parent or is related to the parent in some fashion, perhaps even indirectly.

Sometimes it can be unclear if the pages should have a tag relationship. If you run into a case you can’t clearly resolve, please post it here, so we can discuss it, learn from it, and refine these definitions.