* Tag/word suggestion feature to help with normalization (i.e. Did you mean ‘résumé’?”)
* Tag editing or suggested changes after tag is submitted (i.e. flag-a-tag, community suggesting/editing?)
* Use Unicode and then have a second step that asks the tagger to enter using the English set above? This would require friendly UI that somehow explains why we need to do both. This option essentially combines 1 and 2.
* Creating another way to identify a tag that doesn’t rely on character. Can you look for context or usage in meta information? Or make sure the tag reflects the category where it will live and then ask the user if a potential conflict occurs?

Just some ideas that sprung up when chatting with others.

When the users wants to tag an add-on, they are presented with a couple of text input fields, laid out vertically, where they can insert the tags, e.g. résumé. Next to each field, horizontally, there is a link saying “add alternative ASCII-only spelling to help searches”. When the user clicks on it, it is replaced by another text input and a “+” sign allowing to add another additional text input field. In those fields, users can type the alternative spelling for their tag, “resume” in this example.

There are two things that can happen next:

1.

The add-on is now tagged with two tags: “résumé” and “resume”, but only “résumé” is a primary tag, meaning that only “résumé” is displayed in the add-on’s tag cloud. “Resume” is an auxiliary tag, used only for searches.

The problem here is the inverse scenario: I believe it is rather unlikely that someone typing “resume” will think of the alternative spelling: “résumé”. Hence the second solution:

2.

As soon as the users provides two spelling versions of one tag, we can use them to create a two-way mapping. Whenever someone searches for “résumé, their query will be first checked against the mapping returning “resume” and the search results can now include add-ons tagged with both spellings. This works the other way round too.

So in fact, instead of mapping Unicode letters onto ASCII letters, we’re mapping words onto words (in both directions: unicode->ascii and ascii->unicode). And that’s generated by users, so we have good chances of covering the most popular words first.

Thoughts?

Reckless normalization can be evil. What can be done is suggestion through normalization; if two phrases / keywords normalize to something really similar, then the similar phrase can be shown, among other similar phrases, as suggestions in an autocomplete drop down.

By agreeing on some common nomenclature we could set a precedent and promote simpler tags (you wouldn’t tag something with strange english words). I don’t think this would work for most other things like web writing, novels, movies, etc., but we’re not talking about War and Peace here.

My opinion may be unpopular, but in many cases it doesn’t make sense to destroy your “hit rate” just to be 100% inclusive. I think the altruistic approach of “make everything universal at all costs” is definitely situational. For things like tagging and URLs where uniqueness and visual recognition are paramount I’m not fond of fragmenting otherwise unique and simple phrases into 40 different synonymous alternatives.

A natural English speaker myself, I can’t help but feel limiting the input to US-ASCII (or normalising it to such) goes against the community spirit and essentially implies that non-English speakers are second class users. Would there be any way we could add language notation to the tags, or do simple things such as to hide Cyrillic/Greek/Ideographs from English users by default and vice-versa? I know this would be much harder within, for example Romance Languages – how do you differentiate French/Spanish/Portuguese/Italian without looking at the characters they use and white- or black-listing them from a massive list?

On the tagging front, another idea is to follow Amazon’s implementation where a product must be tagged with a tag a certain number of times by users before that tag is ‘accepted’. These tags can be shown to the user to essentially approve (tick a check-box by each tag you agree with and add any of your own) so as to limit tags which may be obscure/incorrect.

As far as resume Vs. résumé could we not simply have a list of cognates in English which we apply at the point of tagging to catch those few words which have spelling variations. If not we’re still going to need a solution to British Vs. American spellings. Or will people be encouraged to tag ‘colour color’ etc?

Just a couple of my thoughts.