If you’re looking to create a wiki or knowledge base using SharePoint site pages, you’re in luck. Like most modern content management systems, SharePoint includes tagging functionality. You can tag your pages with keywords (folksonomy) and even set up custom metadata, such as categories or classifications. Best of all, there’s no need to know HTML or do any coding—it can all be managed through a simple graphical user interface (GUI). The following works not only for Site Pages, but also for SharePoint Libraries and Lists.

Hi-level steps are:

1. Plan your taxonomy
   e.g. “I’d like to have a Region column so my page could be related to a specific region…”
2. Create supporting term sets and terms under site term store
3. Create library columns and link columns to term sets
4. Create library views
5. Update site search schema
6. Use refiners while searching for content

Detailed step-by-step guide

It is tempting to start from creation library columns right away, and selecting “Choice” field type and populating the field with data immediately. But stop! Actually what we need is to create metadata under term store first. Then when we’d create site columns – we’d just choose term sets we already created.

Choice field vs metadata field. 
Choice fields are OK for static options that will never change. If there is at least a tiny chance that list of options will be updated in the future – I’d prefer “Managed metadata” column type instead. The reason behind it is Choice fields are saved as values, and metadata fields are saved as references. Example: you want to assign lifecycle status for every page, e.g. Draft, Published, Retired. Then you are asked to rename Published into Active. After you renamed choice column options – you notice that existing items are still have Published value assigned (now orphan).  So you have to re-assigning statuses for every existing page. Managed metadata column type has other “Pros”…

Plan your taxonomy (and/or folksonomy)

Think about how would you like your pages to be tagged (classified/categorized).
We’d understand taxonomy as a way to classify content based on a specific category with a pre-populated set of terms (e.g. category: Article Status; options available to select: Draft, Published, Retired). Folksonomy would be a way to tag an article with any word (keyword), existing or added by user at the moment of tagging.
Examples are:

• assign a Region to page; column name should be “Region”; user should be able to select from “Americas, EMEA, APAC”; field is required
• assign one or many keywords (tags) to page; Column name should be “Keyword”; users should be able to select from existing keywords or add custom; field is optional

Create supporting term sets and terms under site term store

 

• You need navigate to Site Settings and under “Site Administration” select “Term store management”.
• Under “Site level term groups” you need to create a term group (e.g. “Site Pages Terms” )
• Under this term group you’d create term sets, e.g. “RegionTerms” for regions and “KeywordTerms” for keywords
• Fill RegionTerms term set with regions

Create library columns and link columns to term sets

This step is very simple

• Add column, select “Managed Metadata”
• Provide name for this column, e.g. “Region”
• Select term set (under “Site Terms”) , e.g. “RegionTerms”
• Under “More Options” select “Require that this column contains information” (as we want Region to assigned to every page and  ensure option “Allow Multiple Values ” is not selected as we want one and only one region assigned

At this moment you can use library and enjoy tagging your pages with metadata. But there are some more nice tricks (to be continued)…