What are tags and how do you follow them?
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What are Tags?
Tags enable you to:
- Follow activity in surnames and topics that interest you.
- Connect and collaborate with others who share your interests.
Whereas your Watchlist enables you to follow the profiles that interest you the most, your followed tags enable you to follow and collaborate on a broader range of activity. Examples:
- Surnames: SMITH WILSON
- Locations: SCOTLAND VIRGINIA
- Projects: BLACK HERITAGE MILITARY AND WAR
- Topics: ANNOUNCEMENTS CHALLENGES DNA
How to Follow Tags
When you were a new member, you may have entered tags when entering your communication preferences. You can add or remove tags at any time here: Special:Following.
When you're following a tag you're alerted to new activity through your daily "Wiki Genealogist Feed" email updates. These updates include activity on profiles, G2G forum posts, and announcements when new members follow the tag.
You can also view tagged activity:
- On profiles, by clicking the "Followed" tab on any activity feed, like this one.
- On G2G, by clicking the "My Feed" tab.
Capitalization, spaces, and special characters
Capitalization does not matter for tags. They are not case-sensitive, e.g. MacGruber = macgruber = MACGRUBER.
Tags are limited to the basic letters of the Roman alphabet and underscores. They cannot have spaces or non-letter characters.
- Spaces should be replaced with underscores, e.g. van der Beek should be tagged as VAN_DER_BEEK.
- Apostrophes should be replaced with underscores, e.g. O'Reilly should be tagged as O_REILLY.
- Accent marks cannot be used, e.g. Piñera should be tagged as PINERA.
Twenty tag limit
Special:Following does not allow you to follow more than 20 tags.
Unfortunately, since we use tags in so many ways, they place a burden on our technical resources. We need to limit them as part of our constant effort to keep costs low and always be free.
If you're at your 20-tag limit and you want to follow another tag, you'll need to delete one first.
How to Tag Profiles and G2G Posts
Person Profiles do not need to be tagged with their surname. They are essentially auto-tagged with their Last Name at Birth.
Free-Space Profiles can be manually tagged with up to three surnames, locations, projects, or other tags. There are fields for these on the edit page for the profile.
G2G forum posts can be tagged when you ask a question. These can later be edited by you or a Project Leader. Project Leaders often edit tags because less-experienced members are not familiar with our commonly-used tags.
How to Find and Create Tags
Every WikiTree project has a unique tag. To find it, look on its project home page. If a project has its own badge, it will also appear there.
See the member-edited Tag Talk page for a large list of recommended tags. The "Tags" tab in G2G links to lists of all questions with a given tag, but keep in mind that many of these are incorrectly tagged.
For advice on creating a new tag, see Tag Names.