Community-managed Taxonomy

http://drupal.org/project/suggestedterms

This module provides "suggested terms" for free-tagging Taxonomy fields based on terms already submitted. It replaces the description field on free-tagging fields with a clickable list of previously entered terms. If javascript is not enabled the list will still appear but not be clickable. It provides the best of both worlds between a pre-existing list of terms and the ability to add new terms on the fly as needed.

From Gábor Hojtsy:

if you need real folksonomy support (per user tagging, editing of own tags, personal tag clouds but still powering a common tag set), you need to look into a contributed module. Interestingly there are two similar solutions for the problem: the community_tags module and the taxonomy_user module. Since I need this functionality for a project, I needed to look at them, so here is a rundown of the differences I see from looking at their implementation.

Combined with community-managed taxonomy, I can see this making it possible for us (Drupal users and people who care about open knowledge) to create our own definitive geographic listing.

Right now place module only understands points, but once I understand geo well enough to use that method of storing location information instead... I'm sure it too can be democratized to allow the feedback of millions of people to identify what's where.

I'm at latitude and longitude such and such, and I am inside Natick!

Agaric would host a server to aggregate the votes...

Old way:

/******************************************************************************
* The following _set functions save information to the cmt_term tables and
* subsequently to votingapi if appropriate.  These function names are based
* on the table names.
*
* They are currently written for clarity over efficiency.
*/

Given that there are so many little forms loaded for any node with more than a couple community managed terms, perhaps there should be an "Enter community tagging mode" block that let's people toggle in or out of having the community-managing aspects exposed. On the other hand community tags is a taken name so it would have to be "Enter community managing of terms mode" or something. I'm leaning against this right now.

CMT will not use relative thresholds, as I considered as an option at one point.

The idea of relative thresholds was that if ten percent of the actively involved community wanted something, that's when it could happen. OR 50% of users who have tagged or voted on a term's name, position, etc.

Instead, CMT will use just straight numerical thresholds (1, 4, X users voted for this change).

Reason? To avoid weird stuff that would happen unexpectedly with a dynamic threshold.

A while back a client asked for the ability to accept taxonomy term (category) suggestions on his Drupal site. It's not what Community-Managed Taxonomy is meant for, but it's a potential application to keep in mind. Here's that request (that didn't go anywhere) and notes from the time:

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People and places that need Community-Managed Taxonomy, even if they don't know it yet, with which we should follow up when Agaric has a working module:

• How do I merge categories?
  http://drupal.org/node/41302

[Proposal to Google Summer of Code 2007 with the Drupal project as originally submitted. Now re-titled Community-Managed Taxonomy to get more with the Drupal way.]

To introduce several features to enable communities of users to create and manage categories directly. Users will be able to vote to combine terms or to move terms under one another in a hierarchy.