What's the difference between a tag and a category? [closed]

Question

I'm not completely clear about this.  I'm following my limit of tags.  I haven't added any categories on my own profile but I have been adding them to profiles that I manage and I can see how this is beneficial for people who might then find those profiles.  I can also see how following tags helps me in the daily feed emails.  I'm still a little fuzzy about the difference and maybe I've just answered my own question and it doesn't matter what the difference is since I can see the difference in benefits but I'd still like to see what answers I get.  Thank you.

Comments

I think some people refer to the various coding elements used for categories, templates, and such as tags, which can be somewhat confusing.

As you've surmised, categories allow us to group profiles by a common factor, while tags allow us to follow activity by a common factor.

Answer 1

Here is a page all about tags.  They are the green boxes, and help narrow down and focus your weekly Feed (that you get by email) and G2G posts.
https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Help:Tags#What_are_Tags.3F

Categories look like this:
[[Category:Devon, Haywood Name Study]]
and group together profiles all in that same category (who have the category on their profiles), such as all the Baptist preachers on WikiTree, all the racecar drivers on WikiTree, all the pastry chefs on WikiTree, and so on.  They have nothing to do with your weekly Genealogist Feed nor G2G.

Comments

Indeed. Difference is not an essential one (or ontological, if you like big words). The difference is in technical implementation and usage. The same "thing" can be found represented as a tag and/or a category, a country, for example.

Which is better? Depends on what you want to do with it. Reminds me a lively debate 15 years ago in the so-called "Semantic Web" communities.

https://oc.ac.ge/file.php/16/_1_Shirky_2005_Ontology_is_Overrated.pdf

Still worth reading if you are really interested in those questions.