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 an 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.