Feature request: tag aliases

maasha · August 7, 2009

I tag my items extensively with whatever keywords that spring to my mind - hoping that the same keywords will spring to my mind when I search for my items. This works very well. However, when I tag items with eg "webpage", "homepage", or "website" I am thinking of the same thing. Would it be possible to allow defining tag aliases so that eg these tags can be used interchangeably?

Same for tags like "bird" and "birds" - perhaps a dictionary can be invoked to identify plural forms of words and link these tags?

Martin

dstillman · August 7, 2009

1) This is what tag autocomplete is for.

2) If you do end up creating equivalent tags by mistake, you can just periodically merge them by renaming one to the other: right-click on a tag in the tag selector in the bottom left and click Rename and enter an existing tag name. (The text field in that dialog should probably offer autocomplete to help with this.)

maasha · August 7, 2009

Excellent. I rest my case.

Bionatsci · August 7, 2009

If you do end up creating equivalent tags by mistake, you can just periodically merge them by renaming one to the other: right-click on a tag in the tag selector in the bottom left and click Rename and enter an existing tag name.

I have added this information to the knowledge base as I thought it was useful there. Feel free to delete it though if you think it is too minor and clutters up the list.

adamsmith · August 7, 2009

thanks Bionatsci - I think it's valuable to update the knowledge base with these things - if you and one other user find them helpful, there are very likely to be more.

Bionatsci · August 7, 2009

No problem - it's the least I can do for a piece of software which has made my life immeasurably easier.

discostu86 · October 11, 2023

I still think this would be a valuable feature to have. Auto-completion only works if the aliases start with the same letters and having to merge tags manually on a regular basis is not really convenient. I'd really love if it was possible to add aliases to a tag.

migugg · October 11, 2023

But isn't creating tag aliases at least as inconvenient as merging tags? Unclear to me how this would be less work. In either case you need to interact with the tag database. Merging has the benefit of keeping the tag database short. Having said that the one thing that would make our life easier were if tag autocomplete were available in the firefox extension, because in my practice this is the main reason for the multiplication of tags. (ah, and I see that apparently this is a planned feature, https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/comment/408783#Comment_408783)

emirsale · October 27, 2023

I still stand upon an idea that tag aliases are a great thing, because this way can resolve the very complex situation when there are a lot of nonuniform tags from recently imported 1000 papers. It is an opportunity to resolve this case in nondestructive way. There might also be another solutions but they not so clear for me.