Retagging Recap

Question

Alot was discussed tagging and retagging wise, and a few things changed this week on SE, so I'd like to recap and consolidate everything into one post, which can be used by those of us doing tagging and retagging work. If you have any disagreements with the content here-in, please post it as an answer, then the community will vote, and when they've spoken, we'll amend this document.

• Tag synonym search was fixed.
  • Prior to yesterday, even if a tag was merged with another, a tag search for the synonym wouldn't instead do a search for the master.
• Tag voting was clarified
  • Even when the community votes to synonymize a tag, that only fixes future instances. A merge needs to take place, which can currently only be done by a mod. Merge requests should still happen here in meta. Also, discussion tag removal and synonymization discussions are on-topic.
  • Here is th list of synonyms: https://cooking.stackexchange.com/tags/synonyms?tab=newest&filter=suggested You can can to it by doing any tag search, then clicking the "info" subtab of that search, then clicking the link to suggest a synonym. (Tedious, I know.)
• Get rid of meta tags.
  • Read this post by Jeff Atwood on the official stance on meta tags. A lot is derived from our very own Aaronut. Kudos to him! The main points are:
    • From this point on, meta-tagging is explicitly discouraged.
    • These tags are useless: subjective, beginners, best-practices
    • If the tag can’t work as the only tag on a question, it’s probably a meta-tag.
    • If the tag commonly means different things to different people, it’s probably a meta-tag.
    • If a meta tag is the only tag on a question, retag it as untagged until you can come up with some better tags.
• Plural vs. Non Plural
  • Plural should have preference unless a collective noun is more appropriate.
  • To make it easier to think about, use the tag in this sentence: "this question is about [tag-name]". It's obvious that "cookies" is better than "cookie". However, it's not so clear that "avocados" is better than "avocado".
  • I (Mike Sherov) am in the process of reversing these now, as I had originally goofed it.
• Verb Tense
  • same "this question is about [tag-name]" applies... use "sautéing" and not "sauté"
• American vs. British Spelling:
  • The most popular spelling should probably be used. However, not a ton of data is available at the moment.
  • Was already discussed on meta.stackoverflow.com and US English was declared as preference considering it was most likely to already be the most popular term.
  • Spelling really doesn't matter, because synonym tag search was fixed!

Answer 1

I think we should probably define some threshold guidelines on when we should accept discussion on tag removal/merging/synonymization. The recent explosion in tag topics has been rather overwhelming, confusing, and tedious to even participate in. Often I go to look at the tags under discussion and find that a full 3 things are tagged as such, if any at all.

Perhaps it might be best if we only accept discussion when say, at least 20 items have been tagged?

I find myself wanting to give input in some of these discussions, but the format/scope is often so chaotic and overwhelming that I just can't find the time. I'd prefer to spend 80% of my SE time contributing to the parent site. The format of presenting 50+ tags and reasons to merge/synonymize/remove/whatever is difficult to respond to because you basically have to type a small essay in response. I think there's a reasonable line between 1 tag per question and 50 tags per question that can be found.

Answer 2

Update on the re-tagging:

I was going through the list to deal with the plural/non-plural issues, and many of them were defined as synonyms. Most modern search engines support stemming, so unless we're dealing with animals, where the plural term doesn't always start the same as the singular form, I don't know that we need synonyms.

The only problem is ... you have to delete the synonym, add the plural term as a valid tag, then do the bulk update ... which I'm not sure if it's updating the timestamps on the questions, pushing recent questions off of the front page.

Is there any way that we can get this done behind the scenes?

Answer 3

Since this post did such a good job identifying recent changes, I'll try to highlight remaining open questions and tasks.

• There is a very large list of synonyms which need voting.

• There is a large list of synonyms which need deleting.

• There is a list of synonyms which should possibly be consolidated.

• There is a list of controversial tags which need to be decided-upon, particularly in light of the recent no-meta dictum.