Agreeing on and articulating what a tag is for sounds dangerously close to moderation. Who decides? Does the first person to use a tag have some autonomy? If I use a tag one way, but lots of other people use it after me in a different way, do they get priority? I'm skeptical. That said, I am in favor of letting users have as many tags as they want within a given character limit. I don't see the point in just one. I think many tags, while maybe inviting spam, also democratizes the process a bit, which I am in favor of. I have had several arguments with Dear Leader about this. He always wins. Let's remember that if a user is not using a tag in a way that I like, I can choose not to see their posts. But that makes me wonder if we can have a cross-ref like "ignore <user> + <tag>", but not either individually. Might be complex to understand for the casual user, but just trying to start a conversation about how to better customize one's experience. Also, what about an autofill option in the tag field? That might help resolve having both "kitten pics" and "kitten pic".
After 30 seconds of thought I imagined that profiles would be wiki pages that anyone could edit, with comments for resolving edit wars. Does that seem plausible? Even if we can't satisfy everyone on what a tag means, individuals don't have to follow the collective folksonomy. If I apply 'programming languages' but the community prefers 'programming language', my tag still exists. It's just less salient because it's just me voting for it. What do you think?Agreeing on and articulating what a tag is for sounds dangerously close to moderation. Who decides? Does the first person to use a tag have some autonomy?
If I use a tag one way, but lots of other people use it after me in a different way, do they get priority?