First pass of retro-tagging is finished!

[ron_newman]

I've now finished a first pass of tagging all the old posts in this community. I can't say I've necessarily been consistent, or that everything is now exactly where it should be, but it's all a lot better than it was a month ago.

I looked over the "health care" category, and decided to split "eye care", "chiropractor", and "acupuncture" out as separate tags. Earlier this month I also gave "dentist" and "massage" their own tags. What's left in "health care" are mostly posts about primary care, with a smattering of specialties -- ob/gyn, psych, podiatry, and the like. None of the remaining specialties have enough posts to merit their own tags, so far.

"business services" is much less of a miscellany than it used to be, since I've split out many specialized services into their own tags -- accommodations (hotel/b&b), computer repair, financial, gym, hair, home repair, housecleaning, insurance, internet, jewelry, laundry, martial arts, massage, moving, photo, shoe repair, tailor, wedding, yoga.

The new category "key/lock" covers anything having to do with either key duplication or locksmiths.

For the most part, I did not retro-tag for sale, free stuff, for rent, apartment wanted, lost & found, yard sale, and other such notices. I retro-tagged a fair number of event notices, but not the many many advertisements from SkyBar.

Things that still need attention:

- The cluster of posts about copy/print/scanning/fax need to be split away from "business services". Someone suggested "office services", which I like, but it sounds a lot like "business services". Maybe "business services" itself should be renamed? Or maybe I should just go with "copy/print" and assume people know that scanning and faxing go there too?

- Another cluster of "business services" posts concern nail care, waxing, and other salon stuff that isn't hair. Someone suggested "salon & spa" for this, but I'm not sure how to make clear that this category serves a different purpose from "hair".

- Yet another set of "business services" that needs splitting out concerns piercing and tattoos. I think I'll go with "body art" for this. (Or is it one word, bodyart?) [Edit: I went with "body art", two words]

- local food/restaurants/dining are confusingly overlapping categories. There is no useful division between them at present. I can't say I've been at all consistent in assigning new and old posts to them. Would be nice to reorganize as (less overlapping) food shopping/take-out/restaurants

- bars and clubs, entertainment, night life are also substantially overlapping.

- civic, local government, and local politics also are a somewhat arbitrary division.

- the local businesses tag has a huge number of posts (240) and I can't get LiveJournal to me more than 117 of them. Something is wrong here, and I've sent a support request to LJ because I don't know how to fix it.

I'm going to take a break from this activity for a few days, and give the other moderators, tag-team folks, and the davis_square members at large a chance to take over this conversation. I look forward to what everyone else has to say.

Because meta-discussions tend to bore a lot of folks, I suggest that people who are intensely interested in this subject join us in the davis_meta community.

Comments

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

You are mind-bogglingly amazing. I looked into retro-tagging an active community once and it was just too overwhelming.

[ron_newman]

I couldn't have done this from scratch. It helped that there was already a tagging system in place that I could build upon.