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Happy new year to everyone and I wish you all a wonderful time ahead!

There were a lot of "big" activity held for tags but I was not part of it due to time/work constraints. Since it's new year, it's a good time to take some cleaning activity for tags. Consider this as Tags gone wild … again but Part 2.

Tag info: User guidance and Tag Wikis

We have some tags that doesn't have any User guidance or Tag Wikis. Here's the list of all the tags that has at least one question tagged but doesn't have any tag info. Some of the tags are self-explanatory but it would be better if we can create tag info (atleast user guidance) which would be helpful for new users.

Extra/Misused tags

While preparing the document, I noticed that some of the tags are somewhat misused (although they are not that commonly used). Here are some of the tags in contention:

  1. (created Nov. 21, 1 question): What does this do? We have got
  2. (1 question): We have got
  3. (21 questions): Does chlorine needs its own tag? (I guess chlorine is special)
  4. (5 questions): We have and
  5. (3 questions): We have
  6. (7 questions): What does it do? Does it means 'electrostatics'?
  7. and (26 questions and 3 question respectively): We already have and . I guess iron and lead are also special.
  8. (1 question): We have
  9. (28 questions): I believe this is one of the most misused tags because it has no strict definition due to lack of tag info. Some of the questions have 'reagent' in the title and hence they are inclined to use the tag. Other than that, I find its usage varied.
  10. (13 questions): We have
  11. (4 question): What does this do? We can merge this to

It is not a one-man job so I'd like to ask the community to take the initiative and involve in this task if possible. I would also request the community to mention any other tags that I didn't include in this document (as I only considered the tags that doesn't have any tag info).

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    $\begingroup$ I was getting worried about tags and what you write doesn't make the situation look any better. It's like everyone who can just makes some random tags, as they see fit. And such disorder has continued for a long time! $\endgroup$
    – Mithoron
    Commented Jan 2, 2022 at 20:57
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    $\begingroup$ There was a time where I had an eye on those, especially new tags. Unfortunately I don't have that any more. But I'm grateful for you bringing it up. I'll try to have a look at these soon (when at a PC) and post an answer. In the meantime, I suggest to simply remove or retag those with low counts (that is what I used to do). For used greater 10 it might be better to use moderator tools. $\endgroup$
    – Martin - マーチン Mod
    Commented Jan 3, 2022 at 19:13
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    $\begingroup$ Also seems that numerical-analysis is seriously misused, to put it mildly. $\endgroup$
    – Mithoron
    Commented Jan 15, 2022 at 16:08

1 Answer 1

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There used to be a time where I had a closer eye on new tags, but unfortunately I cannot do that anymore. Often I would simply retag one-time offenders to a more general tag or remove some which I thought don't fit well. I recommend MATT for that.

I can only encourage you to do the same: If there are few instances that use the tag, it's a viable option to simply clean up the question. Quite often there are other things that need changing, too.

If there are a number of uses, i.e. when the above approach will break, probably starting at round-about 10 uses, bring it here (to meta), so moderators can use the tools they have been given to expedite the process (and not flood the homepage).

There might also be tags that should be generally avoided, probably even banned or blacklisted. We have done that to reaction a while back as it doesn't have a meaning and isn't useful for sorting. (And you probably wouldn't want to believe how often chemistry ist tried as a tag.)
We should have discussions about such cases.

Right now I see heading towards this direction, but I guess if we get rid of it, it doesn't need to be blocked. It won't be available to new users that way, and these usually struggle the most to find appropriate tags.

Since some of the tags on the above list have already vanished, and some must be dealt with on a case by case basis, I'm just listing the moderator action I have done:

  1. I have merged rocks into minerals, as andselsik already said this:

    "They're not they're ." Even Marie got that. (YouTube — Breaking bad compilation)

    No synonym was created.

  2. I have renamed chlorine into . I saw that we for example have and , so I created one for that group. It still needs a wiki and excerpt.

  3. Not really a moderator action per se, as it didn't need moderator tools and only some manual labour, but it's a change noteworthy.
    I have retagged or removed the python tag. I've edited most of the question to retain code highlighting (needs: lang-python), some were shipped off to [mattermodeling.se]. I might have deleted an odd closed one or two.

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