Is it a bird or is it a crow? The influence of presented tags on image tagging by non-expert users

Cultural heritage institutes often make use of tags to facilitate searching their collections. While professionals associated with these institutes are able to add high quality descriptions to objects in the collections, both their time and their areas of expertise are limited. As a result, online tagging by non-professional users is more frequently becoming deployed to increase the number of tags. When these users are asked to tag objects in the collection, they can be confronted with tags submitted by other users. These tags may be of varying quality and present in differing numbers, both of which may influence users’ tagging behavior. We report on a study on the impact of presenting different types of tags on the quality and quantity of tags added by users. We conclude that there is no difference in the quality and quantity of added tags in all experimental conditions, with the exception of the condition in which incorrect tags were presented. In this condition, the quality of the tags added by users decreased. We discuss the implications of these findings on the design of tagging interfaces.