Don't have users "own" tags, just edit them like other shared data

[dfabulich]

Today, users "own" their tags. You can delete your own tags, but not anybody else's.

Instead, the tags should just be an ordinary, shared fact about a game, like the game's description, genre, or external links.

You should edit them on the editgame page, submit changes (including deleting anyone else's tags), and have those changes appear in edit history.

[dfabulich]

A bit of history about why users can only delete their own tags:

Originally, IFDB had this notion that multiple users could assign the same tag to a game, effectively "voting" for the game having that tag. So if a bunch of users all tagged a game "surreal," then we'd know that the game was more surreal than games where just one or two users tagged it surreal.

IFDB even used to have a thing where it would show two numbers next to a tag, e.g. "IF Competition 2001 (3/22)". There was a little help document that explained:

What do the tag numbers mean?

There are two numbers in parentheses listed after each tag in a game listing. For example:

IF Competition 2001 (3/22)

The first number is the number of other people who added the same tag to the game. (Why bother adding a tag someone else already added? It's basically a vote for the tag: it strengthens the tag's association with the game. This improves the search engine by telling it that the game is that much more relevant when someone searches for the tag.)

The second number is the number of other games with the same tag. You can see the full list by clicking on the tag.

But, quickly, it became clear that this isn't how anybody actually uses tagging.

Once anyone tags a game "surreal," there's very little reason to tag it surreal again; it shows up in searches for tag:surreal if even one person tags it that way, and there's never been a feature to sort by the number of people who assigned a game that tag.

Furthermore, this had odd effects:

• There's no way to remove a tag you didn't add (because that would be like removing someone else's vote) #873
• There's no way to see who added a tag, or when #377

Soon after tagging launch, MJR removed the two numbers, and just showed the second number, but left the schema in place, so users still own their own tags.

By managing tags as ordinary game data, it will be visible who added a tag, easy to manage history, and make it possible for ordinary users to clean up tags.

[dfabulich]

There was a thread about this on the forum. https://intfiction.org/t/uncontrolled-tag-deletion/72117

I thought about this a bit harder and I do kinda see otistdog's point here.

People don't go messing around with external links because they are matters of objective fact. But tags are judgment calls. Is this game surreal? Is it horror or is it just spooky?

And then there's tag consolidation. You could imagine someone bulk adding and bulk deleting a bunch of tags using the API, and even getting in edit wars about them, in a way that I don't think is likely/plausible for description, external links, etc.

I'll keep thinking about what I want to do about this.