Tagging is a very easy, and extremely useful, way of marking documents so that they can be easily found.

Tags allow documents which have similar information to be found easily by searching for the tag (click on the "Search" link in the menu bar on the left and try it out).

While it is useful to tag all documents, it is VITAL that you tag images correctly. Otherwise no-one will ever find them....

Tags are added by editing the file you wish to tag, and then typing the tag in the box marked "Tags". If you wish to use multiple tags you should separate them with spaces. If you wish to use heirarchical tags they should be separated by full stops.

You can see a list of all tags currently in use by clicking on "Tags" on the menu bar on the left. This also illustrates how useful tags are, as it acts as a sort of sitemap, with pages being organised into sections and sub sections based on their tags.

Tagging Pages

When you view a page you can see what tags it has applied to it by looking in the bottom right corner. Every document should have at least one tag, which is the name of the section of the wiki it is in. For example, this document has the tag "howto", as it is in the "How To" section of the site. Documents in the "Events" section have the tag "events", documents in the "Rules" section have the tag "rules", and so on.

Some sections of the site have obvious sub-sections, and these also have their own tag. For example, the campaign section of the site has separate sections for each year, 2001, 2002, etc. Pages in those sub sections have what is called a nested or heirarchical tag, which is two tags with a full stop between them. Eg pages in the 2001 sub section of the campaign section get the tag "campaign.2001". It should be fairly obvious what tag you should give to a new page, but if it's not, take a look at other pages which are listed in the same place, and give it the same tag that they have.

You can give a page more than one tag if it is appropriate. For example, a story in the tales section which is based in a particular Shard might also be relevant to the world background to that shard. In this case you could give the page two tags, eg "tales background.shard" (where "shard" is the name of the shard it relates to). By doing this, people who are looking for stories will find it, but people who are looking for info on that shard will also be able to find it.

Tagging Images

It is VITAL that uploaded images are properly tagged - otherwise no-one will ever find them.

When images are uploaded to the site (see Uploading Images & Other Documents) they are automatically added to the Gallery. You can click on the link in the menu bar on the left to see the full Gallery.

All images are uploaded to the same, huge gallery, which has no sub-sections or folders. This means that pretty rapidly there will be pages and pages of images, with no structure or order to them, which makes it impossible for anyone to find anything.

Instead of having folders or sub-sections as most photo galleries do, the gallery here relies on you applying tags to your images. You can then filter the gallery and view only images with a certain tag. Eg if you wanted to view images of characters you would enter "characters" into the query box at the top of the gallery.

The advantage of this system is that images can be given multiple tags, so they will come up in multiple searches. Eg if you have a photo which is both a photo of an event, and a good image of a particular character, you could give it two tags: "photos" and "characters". Then anyone looking for photos of events would find it, and anyone looking for images of characters would also find it.

Heirarchical tags work in just the same way with images as they do with pages, so a photo of the event "Union of the Gates 1810", which was held in 2001, should be given the tag "photos.2001.union1810". That way, anyone looking for photos of all events can just enter the tag "photos", anyone looking for photos of all events in 2001 can enter "photos.2001", and anyone looking for photos specifically of Union that year can enter "photos.2001.union1810", and they will all find what they are looking for.

Image searches can be saved, and then linked to in much the same way as pages, thus creating galleries of specific pictures. So, for example, you could search for "photos.2001" and then save that search. If it is called "Photos of Events in 2001", then you can link to it from any page by entering [Photos of Events in 2001]. Similarly, you could save a search for "photos.2001.union1811" as "Union of the Gates 1810 Photos" and link to [Union of the Gates 1810 Photos]. Any new photos which are uploaded with the same tag (photos.2001.union1810) would be automatically added to this page.

If you are unsure which tag to give your image, try looking at the gallery (or galleries) that you would like your image to appear in, and then give it the same tag as the images already there.