Tags and Tagging

You will see tags all over the Red Planet Travel site. You can think of them as strands the bind the whole site together.

Tags help you search for places and things that interest you.

What are Tags?

Tags are short keyword strings that relate to travel concepts, places and pages on the system.  Tags are checked and controlled by our Red Planetters - if you know a place features something in our Tag list but isn't there - then join the community and make sure its tagged.  

How should tags be used?

Tags describe a relationship between one thing or place and another.  For example if a hotel has a gym you would tag the hotel with the gym tag

This allows people search for a hotel with a gym, and whatever else to find exactly what they want.

Tags in questions can be monitored from within your User Home page.  This means if you are an expert on something or somewhere you can be alerted when a Travel Question you can probably contribute to is asked.

In particular, if a place has a unique or superlative feature, it should be tagged.  Let's say there is city and it only has one Indian Restaurant, there isn't another for miles around, then it should be tagged indian-food. If we are talking about a restaurant in India, then it might not be so useful (as there are probably many restaurants serving the same type of food around).

Tags help elicit information

Tags have an effect on the default section titles on a page.  This means that when someone is adding information about a place on it's page, the existence of tag will result in a page section requesting information about that tag in a paragraph being offered to the section editor. 

This is useful because it encourages the writer to think about whatever is tagged, thus getting more detailed information for the rest of community from the person that knows about the place or route or thing.

Take for example the indoor-pool tag.  If a place is tagged with this a default section will open up titled 'Pools and Swimming Areas' - and helper text will prompt the contributor to describe all the pools, any other swimming arrangements such as rock pools, fountains that kids can swim in, the depth, water quality, proximity to other features and lots of other questions that fit in with the 'data-heavy' way we do things at Red Planet Travel.

How many tags should a page have?

Simple answer: As many as are relevant.  And probably a lot.

Tags are used to filter places and things for their suitability for each visitors personal requirements.  So if you can do nearby-fishing or the place needs to be often windy, since maybe you like kite-flying, then it needs tagging.  You can see a page's tag edit history, so check if the place has been tagged with something before.

How do you add a New Tag?

We allow experienced Red Planetters to add tags.  If you don't have the Reputation Score yet, but want to suggest a tag, please just email contact@redplanet.travel with your new tag suggestion.

Special Tags

lodging – every place you can stay in our Perfect Place channel must be tagged lodging.  If you can stay there, it needs to be tagged lodging; so it includes anywhere you can stay – not just traditional Hotels or Bed & Breakfasts, but maybe a yacht that is rented out, a caravan or a sleeper train.  We are also encouraging experienced Red Planetters to offer their accommodation to others; maybe you have a spare-room, holiday-home, or even wouldn’t mind someone sleeping on your sofa couch-surfing, or doing a home-swap.

point-of-interest – this means “something that might be interesting for Red Planetters”.  So just about everywhere places like museums, art galleries, and shopping centres; but remember we are Red Planetters, and we interested in hobbies & sports, and travel and transport too: So things like stadiums, golf course, tennis ground, and transport infrastructure like ports, airport and railways stations fits the bill.   Since we use Google Places we get data about some things, say company offices that is not really of any interest to us.  In this case the point-of-interest tag needs to be removed so that place doesn’t appear in any search results.

nearby -  We have nearby tags for many things, such as transport options and hobbies.  This means if a place is properly tagged you can find places and lodgings that are convenient for you and what you like to do. Keen golfer and looking for a Perfect Place to stay? Then filter your search with the nearby-golf tag.

autotag – We call Google Places for information about places in the system each time a page is loaded. Sometimes the data we get from that is perfect, and other times less so.  Once a page is reviewed by a Red Planetter and they have added our own tags (usually much more detailed than we get from Google), and validated and corrected any existing, we can remove the autotag and thenceforth the tags on that page are only maintained by red Planetters.

abuse – Sometimes people will behave badly.  If you see something awry, anything you think is offensive or objectionable, the please mark it with this tag or ask a question including a link to the page where you’ve seen something.  A high reputation member of the community will take a look at it.

red-planet-travel The website is new and we always adding things, so things will go wrong sometimes – there will be the occasional bug or maybe you have a suggestion about how things work.  We’d love to hear from you.  Please tag something red-planet-travel or ask a question including that tag, and one of our staff or developers will check it out.   If it is a bug and you can take screen capture or make a screen grab, then include the link to the uploaded file and it will make it much easier for us to see.  Red Planet Travel Staff are known to strongly upvote detailed bug-reports via questions :)