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Comments on What is our policy on tags?
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What is our policy on tags?
I've come to realize that tags began changing pretty rapidly recently. In the past 3 days alone, these happened:
- [urlrewrite] was changed to a more generic [url-rewriting] tag and the tag wiki for it was deleted.
- [sheets] was changed to [google-sheets] because it was considered too generic (Even though as an answer pointed out, it was being used as a generic.)
- [stack] was renamed to [stack-memory] and [heap] to [heap-memory] (which was unnecessary, in my opinion)
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.
- What type of tags will we allow? (Should specific tags like [UrlRewrite] be allowed?)
- How many tags will we allow? (Should we delete any tag that overlaps another tag?)
- 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?)
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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.
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