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Comments on Should we allow capitalized tags?

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Should we allow capitalized tags?

+7
−2

So this has been bugging me for a while now. Recently, the tags Chinese, Cantonese, and Mandarin were changed to lowercase. When asking why on the discord, I was told that it was because "tags are lowercase".

yanchan:

@ArtOfCode why'd you change them to lowercase though

ArtOfCode:

because tags are lowercase

just haven't got around to enforcing that yet

Note that this isn't a technical issue, the site was perfectly fine while the capital tags were being used (they're both just text, after all). This is just an arbitrary restriction to ... I don't know, make tags consistent? (at the expense of English capitalization rules)

So, I'd like to ask the broader community: Should we allow tags to be capitalized?

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General comments (3 comments)
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+8
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I think tags should be case-preserving and also case-independent. By this I mean: I do not want us to have two tags that differ only in capitalization, because I think that will lead to errors and confusion. (If you need tags for "apple" the fruit and "Apple" the company on the same site, find some other way to distinguish them.) If there's a technical benefit to pushing them all to lowercase in the database that's fine. But it should be permissible to capitalize proper names for presentation.

As a user I would find it a little puzzling for tags to allow other character sets (like Hebrew or Kanji) but not allow capital letters in the Roman alphabet. And we do currently allow other character sets.

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General comments (2 comments)
General comments
Olin Lathrop‭ wrote about 4 years ago

In your example, if someone does write your "apple" tag with upper case, it will appear to have a totally different meaning than intended, but the system won't catch "apple" and "Apple" as being different.

Monica Cellio‭ wrote about 4 years ago

@Olin I don't see how that's different from misapplied tags now. People sometimes use the wrong tag because they assumed from the name it was one thing when it's actually meant to be something else. I'm saying we shouldn't allow both "apple" and "Apple" to be tags on the same site; that'll just add even more chaos.