CLOSED: [2021-01-02 Sat 00:49] SCHEDULED: <2021-01-02 Sat> :PROPERTIES: :CREATED: [2021-01-02 Sat 00:22] :ID: 2021-01-02-tag-gardening-publicvoit :END: :LOGBOOK: - State "DONE" from "NEXT" [2021-01-02 Sat 00:49] :END: [[id:2022-01-29-How-to-Use-Tags][I usually do give some advises on how to use tags properly]] - [[id:2019-09-25-categories-versus-tags][within Org mode]] and in general. One best practice is to limit yourself to a limited and pre-defined set of tags: the controlled vocabulary (CV). Since [[id:2017-01-03-how-to-use-this-blog][this blog is using tags as a first-level navigational tool]], you might have noticed that [[https://karl-voit.at/tags/][my tag-cloud]] did not follow that advice. This is because the tags developed way over a decade with multiple authoring and blogging tools. I was too lazy to clean up my tags for too many years. Yesterday, I sat down a couple of hours and cleaned up large parts of this chaos. This is called "tag gardening". I consider this an important process. Therefore I added dedicated features to my [[https://github.com/novoid/filetags][filetags]] tool to support the user as much as possible. Please notice that this is an ongoing process. I should get rid of even more tags in order to get a better controlled vocabulary. I now do have almost 80 tags which is still too much in my opinion. Furthermore, new tags will appear as my personal world is shifting and a few of the current tags will vanish over time for the same reason. *** What I Was Doing For various reasons, I deleted some tags. Most of them got abandoned over the years. Some of them just had too few articles which would justify the tag: - beverage - commuting - design - food - important - informationstorageandretrieval - latex - lifelogging - people - quantifiedself - quotes - templates - versioning I also renamed some tags. Most of them were in their singular form which contradicts the common convention of using the plural form for tags. Some tags were just too specific and I wanted to use a more general term instead: - bicycle → bicycles - book → books - email → emails - game → games - language → languages - news → media - osx → macos (Apple renamed it, [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macos#macOS][again]]) - phone → phones - press → media - presentation → presentations - religion → religions - service → services There were some tags that [[id:2017-04-18-classification][had a certain overlap to another tag]] I was using. This is why I "merged" a few of them in order to use only one for the future: - art + culture → culture - automotive + transportation → transportation - legislation + politics → politics - python + programming → python - robotics + hardware → hardware - scubadiving + sports → sports - shell + software → software - usability + hci → hci - usergenerated + diy → diy - visualizations + statistics → statistics If you like, you can compare [[https://tinyurl.com/ybu656rf][an archived version of the tag cloud]] to [[https://karl-voit.at/tags/][the current one]]. If you are using tags in your personal setup, you should think of gardening your tags from time to time as well.