trials & tribulations of tagging

[cimorene]

I make a plebefic header post just about every day (Science suggests that in the past year the average is 1 day in 2). That's a lot of posts. When I started saving them and posting them 5 per day, in summer 2007, I really had no notion that it was going to become such a long-term thing. At that point, all the scattered occasions I'd posted them in the past had simply been tagged "badfic", so I kept that tag on them until last week.

Aaaaand as a result, my "badfic" tag was completely unusable for finding any posts except the header posts. Whenever I'd want to find a specific old post from that tag, I'd have to wade through pages and pages of headers instead.

The obvious solution was to remove the "badfic" tag from the header posts only, but I couldn't think how. I thought there ought to be some kind of batch-edit function. Dreamwidth does have an Edit Entries page, but you can't batch edit tags the way you can edit metadata in many music players. And anyway, I'd have to be able to take "Posts tagged with 'badfic' and 'headers & summaries'" as the group to edit, then overwrite all the tags on those posts with just one (in order to delete the tag from those posts but leave it on other ones). Dreamwidth doesn't yet have "and" filtering for tags, and Edit Entries doesn't work by tag anyway - the only thing you can do with posts grouped by tag is rename or delete their tags. And there's not a way to search for "Posts tagged 'X' but not 'Y'".

At first I thought that such a batch-edit feature might be useful, so I was considering submitting it to dw_suggestions, but then I realized it usually wouldn't be very useful. If you're talking about batch-editing all posts with a certain tag or combination of tags, it would certainly be useful to be able to re-set the security on all of them at once or to delete all of them at once (this might already be in the pipeline - I'm not sure, but it sounds familiar), but the ability to edit all their tags at once? In order to batch-edit the tags, you'd have to overwrite what was already there, and how often would you want to take a group of posts which all have different combinations of tags and erase all of those, thereby losing information? You usually wouldn't. You'd want to rename a single tag, everywhere it appeared.

waxjism thought I'd have to go through the "headers & summaries" tag and manually delete the "badfic" tag from each and every post, which would probably have taken the next six months or more (more, probably, because I'd get bored and give up). Fortunately I realized I could do it backwards: what I did instead was skim backwards through the "badfic" tag, opening every post that wasn't to do with plebefic headers in a new window (total: 79; total posts tagged "headers & summaries": 336). In the "edit tags" page for each entry I deleted "badfic" and replaced it with a new tag, "greeble". When that was done I deleted the "badfic" tag from the Manage Tags page, then renamed "greeble" to "badfic". It was still labor-intensive compared with how I wish the internet/computers worked, but at least I was able to finish in a couple of hours.

It's so annoying when you are completely sure that the computer should be able to do this (like Delicious.com! It should be able to filter out all duplicates on the Recent page instead of showing every single person who saved something!) and it just can't (yet).

Comments

[brownbetty]

This might meet your needs, or you might be able to adapt it to your needs: http://community.livejournal.com/lj_nifty/155984.html

[cimorene]

That is a nifty tool, but from what I can tell it doesn't deal with the intersections of one or more tags, it just renames a number of different tags, like ones that may have been misspelled, all to the same thing. That wouldn't help you to rename some instances of a tag but not all of them.

[boji]

Saw your post in the 'latest' stream and just popped in to say that I'm right there with you wanting a tags batch-edit function. In an ideal world I'd like it built into the archive page with some ticky box along side the entry header which shows up.

Maybe one day.

Yes, I did spent two hours cleaning up tags today.

[cimorene]

That's a good idea. Seems like it would be a relatively easy way to exclude certain posts from the batch, which could be v. useful if you're batch-editing for, say, privacy or something. Would save a lot of time over if you had to edit them all and then go back and manually revert just some of them.

[msilverstar]

Definitely good to have better tag-wrangling tools. Delicious is moderately good, because that was the basis of their system.

[torachan]

I have a similar problem with my music tag. When I started posting a daily song, I just tagged the posts as music, but now that's the only thing you find in the tag.

[cimorene]

It seems like you started doing those fairly recently. On the other hand, you posted a lot of music before too so even if you tried to start at the beginning of the tag, changing them manually one at a time would be basically impossible. It sounds like your problem is probably worse than mine. I can't think of any way to solve it that doesn't involve sorting by tag+tag and mass editing.