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Deciding if a concept can be materialized to a tag
Note: this is inspired by the comments on this post and especially this one which mentions:
We have tags for languages because people have interest or expertise in languages; likewise frameworks, design patterns, etc. Who is an ‘interface’ enthusiast?
This discussion made me question the way I am tagging questions. As I could not find a discussion about this, I am opening one with this post.
From my perspective, tags should:
- help connect subject matter experts with the question (e.g. filter by tag, subscribe to receive notifications by a tag)
- very briefly describe the topic of the question (i.e. synonymous with "labeling").
- be general enough that it is likely to be reused in the future for other questions
What do you think about this? How should we propose/create tags?
Based on your feedback, I intend to create a Help section topic about this.
1 answer
The sole purpose of tags should be to help classify posts into what they are roughly about.
Being able to easily get the broad topic of posts is obviously useful in searches, but may also be useful for statistics in the future. For example, if a large fraction of posts are about a particular language, then it might be reasonable to create a category just for that language. Such a query would be hard to do without good tags.
Overloading tags to provide anything other than a broad classification of topics will lessen their usefulness for the intended purpose.
When deciding on using or creating a particular tag, a good question to ask yourself is "Will the tag help people find this post when searching?":.
Tags are also not content. Just because way down at the bottom a post is tagged "C++" doesn't absolve the asker of mentioning the language is C++ in the question directly. The text of a question needs to stand on its own, regardless of what is in the title or the list of tags.
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