[wp-hackers] pulling the tags

[Haluk Karamete]

Working with a tag system ( a non-hierarchical taxonomy that is ), I plan
on tagging items like this

Basketball
Michael Jordan
Soccer
Babe Ruth
Muhammad Ali
Jim Brown
Jesse Owens
Joe Louis
Boxing
Sonny Liston
Ronaldinho
Baseball


The point here I'm trying to draw attention to is that some terms in this
list sound like "groups or categories", and some sound like individuals,
persons. Some terms you can find in word dictionaries ( soccer, basketball
etc ) , and some you cannot ( jordan, owens and so on).

Sure, I can take the items that "sound like" groups /or categories from
this tag group and implement them as another custom taxonomy or categories
for that matter. But that's not the point.
In many times in real life, we find that tag clouds contains many mixed
items - exactly like the list above, that is some items sound like
groups/or cats and some don't. and many site serve their visitors like that
and it is certainly not the end of the world. The question is can we do
better with a little trick.

Is the following possible?

Still use the same single taxonomy, but have your content developers tag
the items the following way instead;

-Basketball
Michael Jordan
-Soccer
Babe Ruth
Muhammad Ali
Jim Brown
Jesse Owens
Joe Louis
-Boxing
Sonny Liston
Ronaldinho
-Baseball

Notice that the cat sounding ones are prefixed with a - . Easy enough.
Yeah?

The convenience here is that when tagging the item, my guys still type in
the same box ( that is one place to go for tagging cause there is only one
taxonomy involved )  and they just press the "-" key and boom, the tag
interface displays them with a ajax'ed summary of all the cat sounding
names, and they just pick one, or simply create a new one like such as
"-tennis".

While they are at it, they can go ahead and type the
individual athlete names too... it's like two bird with one stone.

The question is how far does this creative or ( not so creative idea )
live?

My initial questions are...

What happens to the urls ( and slugs ) for those tags that are prefixed
with a "-"?

And what happens to the tag searches? Will my users be able to find Soccer
players by simply typing "soccer" into the search tags box that I provide
for them or is it that they are going to have to type in "-soccer" instead?