Let's actually decide what "cleaning" means

Question

I've found another tag that has two definitions.

cleaning

For questions about preparing food for cooking or about removing the results of cooking that food.

Like with truffles, it is not useful to have these two very different topics grouped into one tag... unlike truffles, this tag is 10 times more used... which makes separating them more complicated.

So, I definitely think this needs to be limited to one definition but the question is - how?

I think cleaning is most simply used to reference the second half of the tag wiki - cleaning everything except food. Most of the existing questions are about cleaning equipment, tools or utensils... or the kitchen in general.

The other half is more complicated... and I don't know that it's really necessary to have a tag for this at all, favoring instead to just use the tag for the type of food being cleaned. If so, then we should just strip that part of the definition out and remove the tag from any question that applies to that definition and add a specific note telling people to not use the tag for that purpose?

The small percentage of questions that aren't about equipment, tools, or utensils are clearly about particular fruits, vegetables, fish, or chicken, so it should be simple to drop this tag from those uses and (if necessary) add the appropriate food-specific tag.

Answer 1

I agree. cleaning should refer to cleaning equipment, appliances etc. Cleaning shrimp (for instance) should be tagged shrimp and perhaps preparation, although preparation is a problematic tag too since it is so broad.

Answer 2

I went ahead and edited the cleaning tag wiki to limit it to equipment things, as there seemed to be sufficient support from the other answers.

I also discovered that washing also existed. Half the questions were fruit/vegetable type things, so I removed it from those, then merged washing into cleaning to take care of the rest.

I think I've also manually removed cleaning from all non-equipment questions, but there were 200 to go through and the list shifted a bit as I was going through when I merged washing (oops) so it's possible I missed a couple.

Answer 3

I would agree with Jolenealaska's answer in that cleaning should exclusively refer to cleaning one's equipment/tools and work area, and that we should remove the "preparation" part of that tag description. I think we could also include cases such as cleaning one's hands or other body parts as well, such as this capsicum-related question.

To address the other part of Catijia's question, I would go a step further to say that we don't need a tag to describe preparation-related cleaning. Do you have a question about cleaning lettuce? Then you can just use lettuce. Your intent will be clear from the question, and our lettuce enthusiasts will still easily find your question and help you out. Got a shrimp-cleaning question (in my mind, this is also called peeling and deveining)? We have shrimp people who can answer them. Are you having a particular problem cleaning a rabbit? Just use rabbit; it's already pretty specific. If you really want to, you can throw in butchering, though technically, this isn't really the same thing.

Note that, for all three of those cases, "cleaning" means something very different. For this reason, I don't think it makes sense to lump them all together somehow. I also think that simply using <ingredient-name> is sufficient. When you just use an ingredient tag all by itself, it usually implies that the question is about some fundamental aspect of that ingredient, in a largely dish-agnostic context, which is exactly what ingredient-cleaning questions do.