Social/Public Tagging For WordPress?

Hey, everybody. I’m trying to crowdsource a WordPress plugin/widget question for a non-ErosBlog project. Google, sadly, has failed me. (This often happens when I’m looking for something that may not even exist.)

Cast your mind back to 2005 or so, when “tags” and “tagging” (and the related term “folksonomy”) were a newish concept on the internets. Nowadays everything has tags, it seems like; but back then, it was new newness to everybody except librarians and search geeks. A bunch of tag plugins for bloggers came out, and then, a bit more slowly, WordPress and other platforms started integrating tags more directly.

Somewhere along in there, somebody said “Hey, wouldn’t it be nifty if we could let people tag our stuff for us?” And in the WordPress world, that meant a couple of plugins that let readers suggest tags for posts. Call this “public” or “social” tagging if you will. It was software designed to let WordPress users blog about a thing, and then let the readers/viewers help propose tags.

Of course, if you let random people tag your shit, some of them will tag it unhelpfully. Ha hah, she’s fat, let’s flag that picture with “pig” and “gross” and “oinker” and “needs to diet”. He reminds me of my ex, let’s flag this picture with “bastard” and “child molester”.

Any public tagging system is clearly going to need moderation of some sort … a way to present the proposed tags (either before or after they go live) to somebody who can review them for sanity and approve/disapprove with a click.

One plug-in that offered this was called WP_Folksonomy, but development on it stopped in 2009 and it doesn’t appear to work well with current versions of WordPress. There were others; I can’t find them now. The only new/current one I can find is WP Tag This!, but it appears not to offer moderation, plus it failed to “just work” when I installed it per the very limited available instructions.

Does anybody know of any more? Once again I’m looking for a WordPress plugin that would let the general public propose tags for posts, while allowing for some moderation of the proposed tags. If it’s out there, I’m sure one of clever people will know…

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