How could we retag meta for easier use?

Question

Meta is the repository of knowledge about the main site's policies, along with all the discussion that helped reach those points. Unfortunately, it's also pretty difficult to search, let alone to read through in order to understand those policies!

As an initial step toward making it more useful, I'd like to suggest that we try to retag past questions on meta. There are 864 questions; limiting that to exclude bug and feature-request and only questions with positive score, it's reduced to 597 questions. A fair number of those are still not about policies (e.g. technical questions) but the extant tags aren't really good enough to sort through that. That's a lot of questions, but I think it's also pretty manageable, especially as a group project, if we know what tags we're potentially applying.

If we have a decent number of questions tagged like that, then we'd be able to use them to start putting together a canonical reference for the site's rules, sort of like what's in the "what can I ask?" but with more detail, and with links to examples and additional context.

So: what sort of tags/tagging structure might we want to use, if the goal is easier understanding of how the site works?

(As a reminder, questions can only have up to five tags, and one of those has to be the mandatory bug/feature-request/discussion/support tag, so our taxonomy needs to fit into four tags per question.)

Answer 1

One of the most important things we need to tag, in order to pull it out and put it somewhere more easily reviewable, are all of the little specific rules that aren't listed in Help: On-Topic. For example, the ruling that pet food is off topic for SA.

There's probably a couple dozen of these buried in Meta, and per Cascabel tagging is the first step in pulling them out. I don't know if we want to call them "New Rule" or something else; I'm not sure the name really matters.

Answer 2

To provide a starting point, I think that we could aim for two levels of tags for common rule/policy topics. The higher level would be associated with a type of site action (e.g. closing questions), and the lower level would be associated with a specific category of issue (e.g. off-topic). That leaves two more tags for whatever else might be related (including things that touch on more than one category), but still provides a good amount of detail/searchability.

Some of what we might end up with given that, deferring for now the more difficult task of actually picking names for things. Note that some of these might have few or even no questions about them; I really have no memory of how many times someone's asked on meta about why their rude post was deleted, for example.

• questions (especially what's close/delete-worthy and what isn't - close vs delete is more a type/severity thing than a fundamental difference); subcategories are cribbed from close reasons; there's much more than this in the help center that might be worth adding?
  • recipe requests
  • nutrition/medical
  • "what should I cook?" / "what can I make with X?"
  • general off-topic-ness
  • needs details/clarity
  • needs focus
  • spam
• answers (especially what's okay and what's delete-worthy); subcategories cribbed from answer flags
  • not-an-answer
  • rude/abusive
  • spam
• editing
  • edit wars
  • proofreading/clarity improvements
• comments (in particular what's acceptable to post as a comment and what isn't); subcategories cribbed from comment flags
  • obsolete
  • thank you
  • other "no longer needed"?
  • rude/abusive

Lower-level flags that are common between higher-level categories (e.g. any kind of post can be rude/abusive) can be the same flag; the combination of that with the higher-level flag is enough to clarify things.