Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Meta

Welcome to Software Development on Codidact!

Will you help us build our independent community of developers helping developers? We're small and trying to grow. We welcome questions about all aspects of software development, from design to code to QA and more. Got questions? Got answers? Got code you'd like someone to review? Please join us.

Comments on What is our policy on tags?

Parent

What is our policy on tags?

+5
−0

I've come to realize that tags began changing pretty rapidly recently. In the past 3 days alone, these happened:

Slightly tangential but still relevant, the [ram] tag was removed from a question because it was considered irrelevant. I put [stack] and [heap] as subtags so the question would still appear under [ram].

This made me realize that we don't have a coherent tag policy. In the comments of the [urlrewrite] post I argued that there was no harm in letting the tag exist. However, Alexei disagreed with me, saying that the number of tags should be as low as possible.

As this is an issue that I feel should be addressed by the entire Software community, I've decided to create this Meta post.

  1. What type of tags will we allow? (Should specific tags like [UrlRewrite] be allowed?)
  2. How many tags will we allow? (Should we delete any tag that overlaps another tag?)
  3. How much should we trim tags on questions? (Should we purge everything that isn't immediately related to the question, even if the topic is about it?)
History
Why does this post require attention from curators or moderators?
You might want to add some details to your flag.
Why should this post be closed?

1 comment thread

General comments (3 comments)
Post
+5
−0

Luckily, we are in a position where we don't have to re-invent the wheel. We can see what went either wrong or horribly wrong at SO, then avoid making the same mistakes. Some common problems:

  • Making too generic or ambiguous tags that could mean a lot of different things.
  • Allowing crap tags that describe what a question contains, not what it is about. Like asking "Is there a way to parse HTML with regex?" then coming up with the tags "way" and "parse".
  • Allowing company name tags.

Ideally, each tag should be useful on its own. That's not always the case, but a tag such as "parse" couldn't even be useful in combination with another tag, it is simply too broad.

Some example of crap tags we've already managed to create: "formula", "text", "format", "merge", "integer", "function", "charts", "bounds", "web". These are all way too broad and ambiguous and should never have been created.

History
Why does this post require attention from curators or moderators?
You might want to add some details to your flag.

1 comment thread

General comments (1 comment)
General comments
Alexei‭ wrote about 4 years ago · edited over 3 years ago

I agree with these points and I have used Stack Overflow as a model because they have the advantage of time and size. They have millions of questions asked over years and by now tags must be in a stable state.