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[proofreading] [The Taggening] How To Streamline Tags On An Over-Decade-Old News Site
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*make one pass through the bloated tag cloud, deleting zero-use tags, obvious misspellings and all the duplicate country tags that have snuck in for god knows what reason
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*that's about half the bloat! Good job!
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*fervently wish WordPress had a tag-merging system like Dreamwidth does because that would DRASTICALLY shorten the remaining work
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*as it does not, or at least you don't have access to it:
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*talk to other editors about best practices on where to merge some things
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*determine 'United States' is a fucking useless tag when literally the entire point of the site is 'translated foreign opinion pieces about the US,' ditto 'U.S.' and 'US'
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*The Tag Bloat Is Real
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*start again at the beginning, selecting tags that need to be merged into other headings
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*open the list of articles under that tag in a separate tab
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*go into the published article queue
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*search a few key words from the article's headline (you cannot search by tags)
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*quietly despair when the headline is as wonderfully vague as "Washington" or "Turmoil" or "The CIA" (all headlines I have encountered in this process so far)
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*sometimes those key words will get you only the article you're after; sometimes several pages of results. How much do you care about whittling down other tags while you're here?
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*Answer: Depends on the size of the search results. I've combed through two-page turnouts (20 articles per page) but pretty much raised my hands in despair at others.
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*if there are a lot of results, it's possible they have no tags that need fixing, since we haven't been using the tag system since 2005? '08? Thing.
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*go into the article whose tags you're fixing
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*pop down to the tag box, type in the correct tag and select, hit 'add'
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*remove the tag that's going away
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*fix other tags on the article as necessary
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*if un-abbreviating a country (UK, UAE, S. Korea for some reason), pop down to the 'country of origin' text box and fix that too
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*keep going until you've cleared the tag; if there's multiple pages of search results, refresh to watch that count whittle down
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*occasionally, sigh at yourself when it turns out your changes didn't save
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*even more occasionally, sigh at the site when it decides you're a spammer, page back, reset the changes, and wait a few minutes to save them again
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*go back to the tag database; remember which page that tag you were working on was on?
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*delete the empty tag!
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*WONDER WHY 'CANADA (QUEBEC)' KEEPS RE-POPULATING ITSELF OFF OLD ARTICLES
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(SERIOUSLY I'VE NUKED IT FOUR TIMES NOW)
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A story by me, currently depopulating 'CIA' one. article. at a time.
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(I'm still not wholly convinced tagging by Full Org Name is at all the helpful way to go about this, but... well, I won the 'we need a Capitol riot tag' fight. I can put this battle back.)
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*also, sigh when you've cleared out a misspelling of a current government official's name and someone promptly recreates the misspelled tag (Antony Blinken, for the record. Not Anthony.)
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*also also, wonder how you looked past 'Bill O'Rielly' not once, but twice, and how that was the more-used variant
Mrs Sheepie
it's rielly popular
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It was only two uses to one, but still. XD
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I also just lucked out and pulled up five articles under the tag I'm depopulating with one search!
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"Dirty War." This will be a wonderfully specific search.
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Only seven articles! Not so bad.
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Headline: "We're Still Picking up Dick Cheney's Pieces"
/apostrophes can throw off the search box
/also I am occasionally 12
practically required search string: still picking up dick
bean check
quebec is determined
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It really is.
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'Quebec' as a separate tag would be reasonable if something specific to the province came up (or if they ever go for and achieve independence).
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But 'Canada (Quebec)' isn't something the site's used since I joined. In 2010.
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I am taking tomorrow off
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*possibly the whole weekend
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