Similar to how identities are non-global, hashtags in bivouac aren't global either. Meaning is derived from who curated the tag. Hashtags in bivouac are managed by .decal documents.

A tagging relationship is expressed in three documents:

• the tag article (held by the curator) explaining more about the tag in a wiki page (and defining how to address the tag curator's and author's inboxes)
• the curators' list of tagged articles (held by the curator) explaining the relationship from the curator's point of view
• the specific document's tag anchor (held by the author of the document) explaining the author's point of view on the relationship.

Hashtag Namespacing

Tags in Bivouac are namespaced to curator roles. They also contain a colon to define the superclass of tags, for example #wiki:whales@curator@@coolhacker.phish for publications about whales, or #karma:trolling@mods@@coolhacker.phish for users warned about trolling.

Microformats

You might be familiar with these, they look a little like microformats (#namespace:key=value)

Some example tag superclasses:

• #admin:appeal - encrypt to only the admin of the group
• #mod:spam - report spam to mods
• #mod:report - report to mods, not to article author
• #wiki:squirrels - articles about squirrels
• #react:downvote - reactions

Censor Lists

Decal tags also include censored topics, where the item in question that members are asked to not mirror is hashed with a salt. This is a cryptographic technique so as to not reveal the address to the referenced document. In that instance, the list of tagged articles is a list of "hash", "salt", "hashmethod", "memo". This is similar to ahmia's list.

In the instance of a censored tag, a user's client should by default not download, mirror, or statically render the document. For example, if @@coolhackers.phish does not want discussion of cheesy broccoli.

Community-Sourced Tagging

Users may also use decal tags as a form of content warning.

Tags may also be submitted to curators and authors by people who are neither the curator nor the author. Pending or rejected tags may optionally be viewed by other members of a group or audience (if public) so long as the tag proposal is still live on somebody's box and someone wants to view it. This can be viewed as similar to collaborative tagging in Danbooru, an image board software.

Tag Priorities

If users believe an identically named tag is better curated by group X instead of group Y, they could choose to go with X's curation and only use Y's when X hasn't made a decision. In this way wikis function like a Union filesystem, where some folders come from one hard drive, but deep inside them some other folders might come from another hard drive. Your view of tags is based on who you think does the best tag categorization, and you can mute or delegate as appropriate. You might even use virtual decision flows to decide and weight them.