Expose per-request tags publicly and enable searching and browsing using such tags

[RichardTaylor]

This is a request that has been made by a user of WhatDoTheyKnow.

The request suggests allowing anyone to assign tags to a request - as an option under the "Things to do with this request Anyone" heading under a request's correspondence.

Their ideas in relation to search include showing search results collected by tag within a particular body.

[RichardTaylor]

Requests where there have been instances of failed redaction could be tagged. A link to such requests could be provided from a transparency report ( #2658 ).

[Gemmamysoc]

Could we 'gamify' tagging requests somehow? Having spoken to mySociety research team, it would be great for future research endeavours to be able to easily see what topics requests are about.

[garethrees]

My idea for this at the Alaveteli mini-retreat was to suggest a number of popular tags (2 or 3) and then allow a free text field to let the user enter a suggestion.

Popular tags would be curated by site admins and shown automatically;
User suggestions could be used to create new popular tags if there are enough similar suggestions;

[Gemmamysoc]

Yeah, that would be great. I'll just flag this to @Rebeccarumbul, so she can add any other ideas. I wonder if we should be asking other Alaveteli sites if they would support development of this; it might give it more weight when we prioritise our work.

[RichardTaylor]

So it appears @Rebeccarumbul now has got tags associated with ~50K requests from WhatDoTheyKnow.

Can these tags be imported into the WhatDoTheyKnow system and used to seed a public / requestor tagging system, enabling, for example, those browsing the site to click on a tag and view requests on particular subjects?

[RichardTaylor]

A user has suggested better marking of requests which have been appealed to the ICO, and in particular those where the appeal has been successful.

Currently we urge users to do this via annotations. Tags may be better as they might enable more attention to be drawn to the ICO decision, and for eg. a list requests with ICO decisions in favour of requestors to be generated.

I manually added some tags to the request in question

https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/admin/requests/299307

ico_decision:FS50614389 appeal_successful ico_decision

I've suggested the user adds an annotation themselves. (I'd do it but the decision notice isn't yet on the ICO website).

Potentially linked to #2819 automated appeals to the ICO

[RichardTaylor]

A WhatDoTheyKnow user has written to say:

Would it be possible to add a group field so that requests can be sorted or looked at by group as it’s getting quite hard to navigate 67 requests.

I think this is something which publicly accessible request tags could assist with.

[RichardTaylor]

Searching using such tags is already possible; eg.

https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/search/tag:takedown
https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/search/tag:takedown%20tag:personal%20tag:personal_information%20tag:substantive%20tag:rejected%20tag:takedown_rejected/all?commit=Search&utf8=%E2%9C%93

[RichardTaylor]

It was suggested on the latest WhatDoTheyKnow call that

• tagged requests could become a WhatDoTheyKnow-Professional feature
• tags could be used to identify requests where there has been collateral hiding / deletion of material we would like to continue to publish eg. when removing personal information.
• tags could be used as a system of flagging requests which need further review by administrators.
• allow pro users to create tags
• show request tags to, if not all users, admins and pro-users on request pages (with tags linked to a tag-search for that tag).

There has also been a suggestion of using tags to highlight requests eg. to show on the front page, or otherwise give prominence to; or to flag them to journalists.

[RichardTaylor]

By not having this feature we could be missing out on a way to highlight requests of interest.

A "tribunal" tag could be used to mark requests which have been appealed to the Information Rights Tribunal for example.

https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/search/tag:tribunal

[garethrees]

Tags are indexed, so that search nearly works.

https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/search/tag:tribunal/requests is what you're after.

Obviously the discovery of this is poor, but its at least usable for promoting on Twitter etc.

[RichardTaylor]

Noting a suggestion raised during the mySociety retreat which was something along the lines of each user could be allocated a certain number of tags which they could allocate to requests.

The idea was as I understand it if tags were to be used to flag up requests of particular value / interest, they could be rationed, so any one user would have to allocate them judiciously.

I think this might be getting away from tagging and more towards an "upvoting" system.

Not crediting the idea to anyone as I might not have noted in the way they were envisaging it working.

[RichardTaylor]

See https://legalfeminist.org.uk/2021/02/04/shining-a-light-on-stonewalls-activities/ for a campaign encouraging users to tag requests via a hashtag in the request subject. The tag is then used to make it easier to avoid duplicate requests to the same body.

Presumably if there had been a public tagging feature they'd have used that.

[RichardTaylor]

A WhatDoTheyKnow.com user has suggested a database field for ICO decision reference numbers, enabling linking of requests to decision notices.

This could be achieved via tagging requests, with a tag format of eg.

ICO_REF:XXXXXXX

key:value tags are used extensively in the WhatDoTheyKnow body database, so using them when tagging requests too feels reasonable.

[RichardTaylor]

Consider legal and other risks of publicising existing tags where they might to draw attention, or be deemed to draw attention, to request threads on which we've hidden material.

[RichardTaylor]

We could start by exposing, and perhaps allowing the public to submit, tags relating to poor public body performance:

mysociety/whatdotheyknow-theme#1143

There is a potential moderation issue though.

[garethrees]

The National Archives allow user-generated tags; might be a lot to learn from their approach.

• They make it clear that it's user-generated content.
• They have a clear help page with step-by-step instructions for users.
• They have a considered approach to tag modification and deletion (edit/delete only your own; report other tags for moderation).
• They have a well thought out moderation policy (only check they don't breach conduct; they don't check accuracy).

[garethrees]

If we did this we'd have to be a little careful about how it interacts with the special behaviour of some tags and showing notes based on a request's tags (#6912).

Let's say we have a Note that applies to requests tagged foo. This would likely be deducible from the exposed tags and the note content. Users could then add foo to other requests and the Note would appear, whether relevant or not. Do we want e.g. #7106 to be user-controllable?

We could automatically generate a moderation notification in this scenario based on the fact that we'd know an added tag relates to a Note or special behaviour, but that creates admin work. Would we then also want to tweak the behaviour of #6912 to list out content that an in-creation Note would get added to in the case that the tag foo unexpectedly exists on some requests?

[FOIMonkey]

We could use tagging to help capture PIT extensions, which could help to differentiate between requests that are illegally late, and ones where the deadline had been legally extended. This could even feed into the Pro dashboard in some way.

[garethrees]

We could have an admin page of "allowed tags" that users can suggest or add (like our body performance tags or pit-related tags). That would reduce the impact of users adding synonyms or tags that generate notes.

[mdeuk]

The National Archives allow user-generated tags; might be a lot to learn from their approach.

As do NARA over in the United States - their "Citizen Archivist" programme has volunteers doing a similar task, and makes use of tagging. They even have "missions" which are a targetted way of prioritising certain activities. Maybe there is merit in us looking at this?

https://www.archives.gov/research/catalog/help/using#Citizen_Archivist
https://www.archives.gov/citizen-archivist/faqs

[HelenWDTK]

This issue has been automatically closed due to a lack of discussion or resolution for over 12 months.
Should we decide to revisit this issue in the future, it can be reopened.