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As of now, has been created for 23 hours by Community user. Which leaves me with these questions:

  • Why and/or how does a bot do this?
  • How will this tag be doing anything better than what is currently doing?
  • Should we burninate it? If not, what are we going to do with it? (Considering that there are no questions tagged there won't be problems, but this whole scenario looks weird to me and this tag might cause confusion in the future [since it's better to have a single canonical tag rather than having related questions divided up using two])
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  • $\begingroup$ I think this link diffrentiates the 2 tags. Regarding the creation of the tag, I remember editing a question and adding this tag. I don't think the edit has been approved yet; maybe that's got to do something with the user being shown as the Community user. $\endgroup$ Commented Mar 31, 2015 at 19:17
  • $\begingroup$ @BinaryGeek That isn't how tags are sorted here. (And I don't want it to be) How is your link exactly showing their difference? Note that reference-request has been synonymized with resource-recommendations and that means they are the same. $\endgroup$
    – M.A.R.
    Commented Mar 31, 2015 at 20:43
  • $\begingroup$ I'm sorry, I confused "specific-reference" with "reference-request". "Resource-recommendation" does seem like a redundant tag now. By the way, I was just looking at this link and it doesn't show that "resource-recommendations" has been synonymised with "reference-request". How do you know that they have been synonymised? $\endgroup$ Commented Apr 1, 2015 at 2:33
  • $\begingroup$ @Martin would you mind writing an answer, or should I step in? $\endgroup$
    – M.A.R.
    Commented Apr 1, 2015 at 15:14

1 Answer 1

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If you have reached the final step of the privileges ladder, you can access the tools page, where you have an excellent overview of the page. It also lists all the newly created tags. If you do not have the reputation yet (I know it takes some time) you can see the newly created tags on the tag overview page.

That being said, I usually keep an eye open for this, checking at least once a week for unnecessary and/or redundant. I often remove these tags by applying existing ones, or sometimes they are even superfluous (most of the times meta tags and then I just remove them. If I am uncertain about a tag, I put it to vote on meta.
Everybody can delete tags. If you cannot yet edit silently your edit will go to the suggested edits queue - make sure you state understandably that and why you are killing a tag. Tags without use will be killed at 03:00 UTC, see How can we get rid of misspelled and unused (or "zombie") tags?.

In the particular case of I burned it immediately when it popped up. Here is my reasoning:

  1. The question itself was barely on topic and is closed now: https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/q/28048/4945. I think having a dead tag on a dead question is cluttering the system.
  2. It is a meta tag, see also How do I correctly tag my questions?
  3. We already have a similar, perfectly scoped meta-tag with the same purpose:

    This tag is for questions looking for a single specific, or a small number of (citable) references.

  4. We already had the discussion about a similar tag, so I followed the procedure there: Merging resources into reference-request.

Another word on creating tags

Creating a tag is a privilege, one should use it responsibly. When deciding to introduce a tag, you should be certain, that it serves a purpose. (And also that it will be used more often than just that one time you created it.) You should write up at least an excerpt, so that people understand what the scope of the tag is. (Find similar questions that fit in the category and tag them. A tag should IMO have at least 3 questions assigned to it, that define the scope.) For example, I recently created of $\ce{CO}$ to distinguish these from the organic class of compounds . Since I do not want to bump too many questions at once, I am looking slowly to extend the use of this tag. We should not go about it and retag fifty questions at once. This will bury any new question and new users will be more frustrated because they do not get any attention.

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  • $\begingroup$ BTW @Mart remind me to include this in TRE. $\endgroup$
    – M.A.R.
    Commented Oct 1, 2015 at 20:48

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