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Tag creation/deletion criteria for Software Development?
Ok so we have fairly lax tagging rules here, as do most Codidact sites. Recently the Electrical Engineering community has started a clean-up of strange and off-topic tags. I wrote this over there: Tag creation/deletion criteria.
Those who have a background at SO might recognize the huge system problems SO has with "tag burnination" described in the question of the linked post. I do not wish that Software Development makes the same mistakes as SO did, and that we can dispose of bad tags much more effortlessly.
But some manner of rule set is still needed before someone goes ahead and deletes tags - from the link, I made this draft for a tag renaming/deletion criteria:
A tag must fulfill all of the below requirements or it may get renamed or deleted:
- A tag must be named appropriately, considering Tag naming guidelines.
- A tag must be on-topic, meaning it has to be related to Electrical Engineering.
- A tag must be unambiguous in the context of Electrical Engineering. It should not mean two very different things at once.
- A tag must add at least some meaningful information regarding what the question is about.
- A tag should not be too localized/specialized, but about some well-known term in Electrical Engineering. If it is unlikely that other posts will ever use the tag, it is too localized.
Replace Electrical Engineering with Software Development and this could as well apply here too, since this is a quite similar technical engineering community.
Should Software Engineering adopt similar guidelines and tag deletion criteria?
1 answer
Yes, but with some notes
I think this a good idea, but we will need to provide more details and agree on some details.
- A tag must be named appropriately, considering Tag naming guidelines.
I have mixed feelings about using uppercase in the tag names. I am inclined to switch to using the original naming (e.g. all uppercase for acronyms), but this goes against the reflex created by communities such as SE ones. This is also supported by Codidact tagging search functionality (when editing the post) which is case-insensitive.
- A tag must be on-topic, meaning it has to be related to Software Development.
- A tag must be unambiguous in the context of Software Development. It should not mean two very different things at once.
This is clear to me.
- A tag must add at least some meaningful information regarding what the question is about.
This requires more details and I guess it is tightly related to Deciding if a concept can be materialized to a tag meta question which needs more feedback from the community.
- A tag should not be too localized/specialized, but about some well-known term in Software Development. If it is unlikely that other posts will ever use the tag, it is too localized.
This is also clear and I think we should adopt it.
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