On tags and time periods

Question

This is a follow up inspired by Improving our tagging (redux). Let's think about tags for dates and date ranges.

I'll begin by listing some of the prior questions that may bear on this question:

• Should we use century tags (like 20th-century) or alternative, typically numeric year-range tags (like 1900s)
• How can we clean up our date/event tags?

Here's a thought-experiement I would like everyone to think about, for this question and for any of the other re-tagging questions. Imagine that we are at a conference like RootsTech or Who Do You Think You Are Live, and we have volunteered to work a room where people can come to ask us questions. We have ribbons on our name badges and a sign behind us where we can pin up tags so the people asking questions can see which desk to go to, depending on what kind of question they have.

Take a look at your profile and sort your badges into classes. Pull out a list of your tag badges. What do you see?

I have one silver tag badge for united-states, and these bronze badges:

You can see at a glance that I am interested in methodology, that most of my answers have been about the United States and England, and that my focus so far has been in the 19th and 20th centuries. It shouldn't be much of surprise to see that I've also answered a lot of questions about census records; for England and the US, the most useful census records are (surprise) in the 19th and 20th centuries.

What do your tag badges tell you about your answers and your self-answered questions? Are they an accurate reflection of what you are interested in answering, or that you are likely to be able to answer?

Newcomers aren't likely to look at our profiles to see which badges we have. But it does give us a way to look at the tags as Jeff Atwood suggested on this post on the Stack Overflow blog:

Periodically asking questions like “who would ever subscribe to this tag, and why?” can reveal a lot about the nature of tagging on your site.

If I were a person in a hurry, and the site was busy enough that I only had time to look at these tags (either by search or subscription), then would this give me a selection of questions I could likely answer? Yes, it would. I'm far more likely at this point to be able to answer questions about the 20th and 19th centuries than I would about the 18th, 17th, or earlier.

Now -- for breaking down questions into time periods, is this good enough? Is there another way, and if so, is it a better way?

One could divide questions in England into before-and-after 1837, because of civil registration and census records after 1837 and (mostly) the lack of them before.

Canadian questions could be before-and-after Canadian Confederation.

For US Census records, there's a big divide before-and-after the 1850 Census because of the lack of every-name census records. For immigration, pre-and-post 1840, for naturalization, pre-and-post 1906. In the USA also, the colonial period is a different kettle of fish than later on when you have federal records.

Would it buy us anything to use tags to sort out questions from the different eras?

Maybe your answer is "no" and the century tags are enough. But what I'd like us to think about are ways to group the site's questions into pools that a person could look over to get inspiration for their own question, and that those of us who have 'expertise' (in the loose sense, not the I'm-certified sense) in an area could subscribe to a tag in case they needed to -- or to point a new user to a group of questions that might be useful.

In the same way we might say "you have a DNA question, why not look at the other questions tagged dna", are the century tags enough to do the job?

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Now that I've seen some of the answers, I wonder: do we need time period tags (specifically, the decade and century tags) at all?

Answer 1

I see three classes of 'time period' tags that we need to discuss, and

1. want to assess each of them in the context of what is needed of a tag
2. talk a little about an alternative approach that JanMurphy raised.

What is needed from a tag?

In various places, we are told:

• Tags are a map of what our community is about/not about (and so implicitly about allowed and disallowed topics)

• Tags are for organising (not summarising) content, to group questions into specific well-defined categories, so that:

  • experts can find suitable questions they might answer
  • those looking for answers can find potentially-related material that might address their need
  • users can filter their view of the site to highlight material of particular interest/downplay material of little or no interest

• The most-popular (or only) tag on a question is used for SEO purposes (prepended to the page title in search engine results) -- worth noting, this can reduce the amount of a question title that is visible significantly for long tag names.

• Tags must work as the only tag on a question.

(All this is irrespective of how people choose to be alerted to new content -- newsletters, rss feed or whatever-- the medium doesn't affect the purpose of tags).

Classes of 'time period' tags

The three classes of 'time period' tags I suggest we discuss are:

1. 'Named' time-periods e.g. world-war-1, world-war-2, us-civil-war
2. 'Century' tags e.g. 18th-century, 19th-century
3. 'Decade' tags e.g. 1840s, 1790s

For comparison purposes, history.stackexchange.com make much more use or Class 1 (Named periods) than we do. They use century tags, but most of them are not high up on the list of popular tags (which mitigates some of their disadvantages). They use decade tags very sparely, and only for the 20th century (I'm guessing there are fewer widely-recognised 'Named periods' in the 20th-century.)

Assessment of current time-period tagging aproach

1. 'Named' time-periods e.g. world-war-1, world-war-2, us-civil-war

We use these for questions related to events that took place in a widely-recognised named period, and/or records that were created specifically during such periods.

Allowed/disallowed topics?

Yes (except the absence of a tag for a particular named period doesn't make it automatically off-topic, just not asked about yet.)

Useful to organise material?

Yes (and there doesn't seem to be tendency to use them to summarise rather than organise).

Meaningful and helpful as the first element of a Search engine result?

Yes, because of the degree of specificity involved.

Works as a lone tag in a Genealogy context?

No. Usually a geographical tag is necessary as well, as well as a more a genealogy-specific tag, but that applies to most of our questions.

Conclusion

'Named time-period' tags (IMO) are good, useful specific tags and should remain. And we could extend this class of tags when necessary (e.g. middle-ages, french-revolution).

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2. 'Century' tags e.g. 18th-century, 19th-century

We use these for questions about events and/or records created in the relevant century, or people who lived in that century.

Allowed/disallowed topics?

Not really helpful, as any century for which there are genealogical records available is on topic. Plus, they're based on a western-centric calendar and we don't want to discourage questions based on other calendars (hoping the relevant experts will show up to answer them).

Useful to organise material?

Possibly, although the availability of genealogical records in any particular place rarely aligns with a century boundary

They might be useful as a very-high-level categorisation so that people can filter out noise about centuries that aren't relevant to their interests/expertise. However, there's a tendency to add a century-tag to every question, because they exist, even if it's just summarising the question (not always accurately) rather than categorising it.

Meaningful/helpful in Search engine results?

I say not. They're likely to be among the most popular tags (because they're ubiquitous) so will end up at the front of many results and displace a more relevant tag; even though they're rarely the most important thing about a question.

Also, the time period in question is almost certain to be specified in the title or body of the question and so affect the search results.

Works as a lone tag in a Genealogy context?

No. Usually a geographical tag is necessary as well, as well as a more a genealogy-specific tag, but that applies to most of our questions.

Conclusion

I'm in two minds about 'Century' tags.

There's a tendency to use them because they're there and 'must therefore be useful' but this leads to a number of drawbacks (especially in search engine results).

They could have some utility for high-level filtering. Wen our traffic volume goes up, I'll probably concentrate on 18th, 19th and 20th century in England and Wales, for example -- it's a high-level filter but will cut out most of what I can't help with. But then so would just filtering by England and Wales... But I recognise the same approach might not be true for other geographies -- an American genealogist whose ancestors immigrated in the nineteenth century may not be interested in sixteenth and seventeenth century colonists and immigrants, or their records.

IMO, we wouldn't suffer if we significantly reduced the use of century tags as long as we used other more 'intelligent' tagging approaches, but I'm not sure we're ready for the re-tagging workload that would involve; and there are cases where they are an appropriate distinction. We should certainly discourage using a Named-Period and Century-Period tag on the same question -- one makes the other redundant. (Note: using a mixture of 'Century' and 'Named' tags will potentially increase the number of tags an individual will need to monitor.)

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3. 'Decade' tags e.g. 1840s, 1790s

We use these for questions events and/or records created in the relevant decade, or people who lived in that decade.

Allowed/disallowed topics?

Not really helpful, for the same reasons that century tags fail this test.

Useful to organise material?

Much less so even than century tags, and for the same reasons.

In particular the range of expertise of an individual is very unlikely to be restricted to a single (or small group of) decade(s).

It's been said that (multiple) decade tags help narrow down searches, but that only works for 2 or three decades. If a question spans 4 decades or more it may not show up in your search because there isn't room for 4 decade tags plus a geography tag and a tag that's really useful to categorise the question! And if search results aren't consistently useful, they're no use at all. (If you really want to search on a specific date range mentioned in a question, Google is a much better way of doing this, and it brings up answers as well as questions).

Meaningful/helpful in Search engine results? No. This is almost never the most important thing about a question, but again they're ubiquitous.

Works as a lone tag in a Genealogy context?

No, for the same reasons as all other time-period tags.

Conclusion

As you can probably guess, I think we should ditch 'decade' tags, as they serve no good purpose that can't be met in another way, thus freeing up 'tagroom' for more useful categorisation (and possibly even making people think more carefully about the right tags to use). And if they are retained, they should be used instead of the other time-period tags, not alongside them. And we should be vigilant to retag questions where another period-tag is more useful.

Is there a better way?

To address Jan's questions about 'Is there a better way' [rather than using calendar-based time periods such as centuries]?

Well, yes, sometimes, but it would involve a lot of work (including -- ta-da -- creating new tags, improving our tag-wiki and re-tagging questions) but IMO the payback would be worth it. (and better to do it now than later when the workload would be worse).

An example of where I think a calendar-based tag isn't a good solution, even if the question relates to a specific period, is:

How did the information gathered for civil registration vary with time in England and Wales.

Right now, to categorise that question you'd need the following tags:

england and wales (as civil registration was the same across both countries). You can't use united-kingdom because things differed in N. Ireland and Scotland (as well as sundry islands around these shores).

19th-century, 20th-century and 21st-century to cover the time span of interest (recognising that the first 37-and-a-bit years of the 19th century is not relevant).

vital-records because it includes all of birth-records death-records and marriage-records. (You might argue that the question should be split by record type, but that would involve an awful lot of repetition in the answers).

That's six tags, so which do I lose? Geography is essential. Vital records is essential. So I have to ditch all the time periods as just losing one of them would be misleading... And then people following by time periods would perhaps never see my question.

I think a much better solution would be to tag it civil-registration england wales. Those three tags (combined with a good tag wiki that specifically identifies the period during which Civil Registration has taken place in England and Wales) categorise the question completely.

Or even: civil-registration-england-wales. That would allow the tag wiki to be very specific, but it is a long tag which would affect search engine results. However, civil-registration could get very unwieldy if it had to cover all geographies, which would make it much less likely to be useful (or even to get created). And of course this approach could be generalised.

But sometimes a time period is the right thing to use, even with a specific record type.

What information would I find in a Wiltshire parish register baptism entry for the early 19th century?

I'd tag that with:

baptism-records -- no need for parish-register as baptism-records is more specific.

wiltshire ( there might be local record keeping practices) -- it might get retagged to include england as well and possibly lose wiltshire if an expert deemed though the more general tag was applicable instead (i.e. there were no local peculiarities of note).

nineteenth-century -- broad time classification. There is a distinction in the records pre- and post-1812, but a good answer would include that anyway, and somebody asking the question may not know that break-point.

And sometimes we can't be specific about record-type either:

Looking for the birth-date of Fred Bloggs in England around 1865?

Thing-place-time again:

birth-records england nineteenth-century.

In summary

What we have right now is a reductionist approach to tagging for time-period (century/decade building blocks) combined with the sparse use of more 'intelligent' Named-period tags. This severely reduces the tagroom available for more important tags and (as others have pointed out) leads to redundant and/or misleading tagging as well as poor search-engine presentation.

What we should have is a simplified set of basic building blocks for use when nothing more specific is relevant (centuries and other major calendar divisions relevant to non-Western calendars); plus an increased set of Named-period tags (created as they're required) plus more specific record-type tags that include geography explicitly and time-period implicitly.

Answer 2

Say I have a question about an ancestor who served in the Second World War. Do I tag 20th-century, 1930s, 1940s, world-war-2, all of the above?

It will become unsustainable before long. We'll have some questions tagged with decades, some with centuries, some with neither. And that's not helpful for anyone looking for questions about those specific periods.

Here I propose removing the decade tags entirely. My reasoning:

• People don't know when to tag decades, and when to tag centuries. I don't know sometimes, even though I wrote the usage guidance for many of them. We subsequently have a mishmash of some questions tagged decades and some centuries.
• Some questions end up having 2 or more decade tags, which in some cases consumes valuable tagging real estate. Or the ones that should be tagged 2 decades only get one because there are more important tags.
• Any tag that has a decade tag could equally validly have a century tag. For example, with the current usage guidances there is no reason a 1920s question shouldn't also have the 20th-century tag – other than that would be plain silly.
• Decade tags usually serve minimal useful purpose in grouping questions. Questions rarely are specific to one decade. Near the top of the question list is: Meaning of “dofhoadayne” in 1648 Will of William Noake from Longburton, Dorset, England?. This question is not specific to the 1640s, but it is tagged as such. Palaeographically if makes little difference whether the question pertains to the 1640s or 1670s; hence the usefulness of a century tag which encompasses this entire period.
• To search for all questions in a multi-decade period, one has to do complex searching techniques (which I suspect the vast majority of users do not know how to do). Tags should cater to the moderately experienced user, rather than those who know the intricacies of the StackExchange search algorithms.

I support the tagging of events or conflicts in addition to the century, because the conflict tag conveys much more than just the time period.

This being said, in an ideal world I think it would be useful to be able to tag certain large record sets that are specific to a year or time period. For example, I think it could be nice to have a tag for uk-1881-census. Not for questions that mention the 1881 census, but for questions about the 1881 census. However, at this time I do not support such a proposal because I think it would become a worse tagging mess than the decades. The search function is adequate for findings questions that mention the 1881 census, even though it is not good for weeding out questions about the 1881 census.

The bottom line is that our tagging of dates needs to be simple and straightforward. Century tags are the answer to that. Adding any further tags such as decades or eras just makes tagging more confusing to the average user, which makes the tag groupings less useful to everyone.

Answer 3

OK, I'm going to try to summarise the views I've seen so far after more than a month. (Please feel free to correct me if I've misrepresented the answers so far).

1. There is general support for tagging by (western-calendar) century -- e.g. 18th-century. It acts as a (very) coarse filter on questions that -- in conjunction with other tags -- can narrow down the questions that might be relevant to askers and answers (however they seach/otherwise filter questions). It could and should be supplemented with similar coarse-grained filters for other calendars if and when we need them.

2. There is general support for some tagging by more specific time-period/event/place e.g. world-war-1 where the periods and geographies involved are well understood, as long as the tags are only used for records/events specifically related to the period/event/place concerned (rather than just coincident with that period). An 'event' tag should not be used alongside century-tags as an 'event' tag is more specific. There may be occasions on which we want to extend our 'time-period' tagging, but we need to ensure the periods we pick are widely understood and produced a distinctive set of records.

3. A more granular approach to time-tagging is possible, that combines time-period/record-set/geography (as per the original question); however, although this would be useful, the effort involved probably isn't justified.

4. Decade-tags e.g. 1890s have little support and should be deprecated. They confuse users, consume valuable tagging real estate, and serve minimal useful purpose in grouping questions. Searching for one or more decades is supported by other means (and searching by tag may be misleading). An argument has been made for using decade tags for the 20th century and beyond, but without much support; we should revisit thisif a good case is made.

If this summary is accepted, I propose we:

1. Edit the tag-wikis for the 'century' tags to remove reference to the decade tags (but mention that non-western tags can be defined if needed).
2. Review the tag-wikis for 'period/event' tags to ensure they give guidance on when to use 'period/event' (including relevant geographies) and when to use 'century' instead.
3. Edit all questions with a decade tag to have a century-tag instead (I'm willing to do take on this workload, as I believe it's less confusing for users than having a tag synonym, althoug that might be an interim step).
4. Review questions with both 'period' and 'century' tags to decide which is appropriate and edit the tags accordingly.

Answer 4

I agree with @ColeValleyGirl that:

The three classes of 'time period' tags I suggest we discuss are:

1. 'Named' time-periods e.g. world-war-1, world-war-2, us-civil-war
2. 'Century' tags e.g. 18th-century, 19th-century
3. 'Decade' tags e.g. 1840s, 1790s

but where I diverge is on the use of Century and Decade tags.

I think many questions on this site can benefit from 1 (sometimes 2) time period tag(s), and 1 (sometimes 2) geography tag(s) which leaves 3, 2 or 1 tags available for other purposes.

If a question is tagged with a named time period then I see no need for further time period tags on that question i.e. I think these named time periods are more important to have than centuries or decades.

I started on this site thinking that century tags were more important than decade tags, and that decade tags should not be used. However, I now, after seeing many more Q&As, have come to the conclusion that decade tags should be preferred to century tags, and so, if 1 or 2 decade tags are clearly applicable to a question then I would use them instead of a century tag. If a question covers three or more decades of a century then I would fall back to using the century tag instead.

My reason for this is that I think century tags are too coarse, and particularly so for recent centuries. A tag for every year would be too granular, while a tag for each decade seems to be about right.

For example, I may want to quickly review our questions on East Lothian in the 1820s and 1830s, which I can do by typing [east-lothian] [1820s] [1830s] into the search bar (which currently only finds one Q&A, but imagine a site 10 or 100 times our size).

On the other hand a search on [scotland] [19th-century] in the search bar brings back a far less useful set of Q&As for me.

Answer 5

To better understand ColeValleyGirl's answer and comments about expanding the selection of named-period tags, I wanted to think more specifically about what this would entail. Such named-period tags would typically be tied specifically to a certain geography.

For the UK – that is England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland (pre-1921) and Northern Ireland (post-1921), the named periods on a genealogical timescale might be:

• tudor-period (1485-1603)
• stuart-period (1603-1714)
• georgian-period (1714-1837)
• victorian-period (1837-1901)
• edwardian-period (1901-1914)
• world-war-1 (1914-1918)
• interwar-period (1918-1939)
• world-war-2 (1939-1945)
• postwar-period (1945-present)

Now this seems really nice, because it so happens that many of these periods coincide with events of genealogical significance, such as the introduction of civil registration in 1837. The ties between family history and the history of nations can be easy to overlook. Genealogists will also often have expertise or interest in one or more of these periods, which enables them to filter down to just that period rather than just a broad century.

Obviously these periods would only apply to the UK. I started trying to form a list for the United States and Germany (our other two most commonly asked-about countries), but really struggled as there don't appear to be widely accepted named periods. If anyone is willing and able to make an example of named periods from these or other countries, please add them here.

My biggest fear is that we would be constantly checking this list to see how to properly re-tag questions. If the century tags also still exist, then this raises the question of how will users know which to tag?

Answer 6

Rather than being too purist in our approach to tagging questions for the time period of relevance to them, I suggest a pragmatic guideline of using time period tags in this order of priority:

1. Named time periods when they are more or less recognized universally (at least in the English-speaking world) e.g. world-war-1, world-war-2, us-civil-war
2. Century when 18th century or earlier
3. Decade when 19th century or later because by the 19th century governments begin to take a census every 10 years suggesting that too much changes in 10 years to assume that what was true 10 years earlier still holds.

Users will not need to know that decade tags prior to the 19th century should not be used if each decade tag in the 18th century and earlier is made a synonym of its century tag.