The Quest for Quality Tags

Many online communities use tags - community selected words or phrases - to help people find what they desire. The quality of tags varies widely, from tags that capture a key dimension of an entity to those that are profane, useless, or unintelligible. Tagging systems must often select a subset of available tags to display to users due to limited screen space. Because users often spread tags they have seen, selecting good tags not only improves art individual's view of tags, it also encourages them to create better tags in the future. We explore implicit (behavioral) and explicit (rating) mechanisms for determining tag quality. Based on 102,056 tag ratings and survey responses collected from 1,039 users over 100 days, we offer simple suggestions to designers of online communities to improve the quality of tags seen by their users.