Using labels in Answers

Labels are a great way to organize and manage your content. When used correctly, they can be a powerful asset to help you manage and report on your Answers articles. Such reports may include content needing review, seeing which articles belong to which application in your service catalog, or just general insight into what could use a bit more documentation.

An example of how labels can be used is demonstrated on the right side of this page, under related content. That macro uses the label, label, to bring up other pages with that label.

See below for the best practices and how to effectively use labels.

Applying Labels

Applying labels can be done on any page of which you have edit access to. To add labels on a page, go to the bottom of the page and select the labels icon, or just press the hotkey (l) on the desired page. From there you can enter all labels associated with the piece of content. 

Best Practices

In order to effectively label your content, here is a list of best practices to follow to ensure that your content is accurately labeled.

Use Lowercase

According to Answers, ThisIsALabel and thisisalabel are two completely different labels. Using mixed case tends to confuse Answers, and could include or omit articles of mixed-case. If you utilize all lowercase in your labels, you eliminate that confusion. 

Use Hyphens

As labels in Answers are single string identifiers, spaces cannot be included in the label. When dealing with items that usually have a space in their name, such as Orange Tracker, it is best to replace the space with a hyphen. For example, instead of orangetracker, use orange-tracker.

Avoid Plurals

When it comes to using orange and oranges, they are completely different labels. If you adhere to a standard that does not include pluralism, you eliminate any sort of confusion that may be caused by that.  

Keep It Short

The idea of a label is a short identifier of what a piece of content pertains to. Having a lengthy label allows for user error when creating the content, and can lead to too much granularity and not being able to run efficient reports on it. 

Bringing It All Together

We could have a group of pages with labels such as SyracuseOrange, Syracuseorange, syracuseOrange, Syracuse-Orange, syracuse-Orange, SyracuseOranges, etc. They all pertain to the same purpose, but reporting and managing would be difficult. Instead of having a multitude of labels, using the best practices we can bring that down to a single, simple label of syracuse-orange.  

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