What are the considerations for using picklists versus taxonomies in SharePoint?

SharePoint Managed Metadata Question of the Week Each week we will be featuring an audience question from WAND's recent webinar, "Managed Metadata 101: Taxonomies and Tagging in SharePoint," and sharing the answer with our blog audience.

 

This week's question is: "If the taxonomy is only being used to sort and filter documents in a single library, what are the pros/cons of using a term set vs. a choice list.  With just a few choices (e.g., 2 - 10) a list seems like it may be easier to implement and use.  Any other considerations for choice lists vs. term sets?

Answer: There are a few considerations of term sets vs choice lists:

1) Do I want to be able to associate synonyms to a term?
2) Do I need to translate terms?
3) Do I want to have the terms organized in a hierarchy?
4) Do you want to share the picklist across libraries or sites?
5) Do you want to make changes to a shared list of terms and have those changes populate everywhere the set is used?

If your  answer to any of these is yes, then you should use a term set instead of a pick list.