[wp-hackers] Categories _contra_ tags

[Otto]

On Mon, Mar 24, 2008 at 3:30 AM, Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
<computerguru at neosmart.net> wrote:
>  What was it about Tags that WordPress's categories just didn't offer? After all, there WAS a lot of user-experience missing without the tags, so what is it that they added that made it so much better?

Different interfaces. Really, that's it.

-Categories are hierarchical in nature and tend to not be changed/created often.
-Tags are flat (no hierarchy), can be created on the fly by simply
typing them, and tend towards being larger numbers of them on each
post.

Conceptually, they are not really any different. Internally, they are
both terms inside of different taxonomies. Some people prefer one,
some prefer the other. Some (probably most) use both for different
sorts of things.

But really, they're just describing posts with some set of words. The
reason for two things is wholly the different interfaces. The two
types of interfaces are not particularly compatible, so they're both
offered. Anybody can use either/both in the way they see fit.