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I have not had much time lately to get into cleaning up lonely and confusing tags, so there was (and is) a bit of a pile to get through. With this post I would like to direct your attention to some cases and tagging in general. There are quite a few tags going round that don't make much sense to me and additionally have no further indication of what they should be used for (no tag wiki or excerpt). For those of you who have not yet found it, we actually have a FAQ about the use of tags in general: What do I need to know about tagging?. Within this, you'll find MATT, which is quite a good way to tell whether a tag has enough merit. So please keep an eye out for the strange one and edit them out or replace them with already existing tags.

Let's get to it then:

  • There are two tags which I kind of understand where they are coming from, but I don't think they are a good fit here. Both are coming from a similar background. An earlier meta post has had no really concluding outcome, and maybe it's time to resurrect it: Should we create tags for chemistry software?
    I was and still am against creating these tags, there would probably be to many to far between to be useful. We don't have tags for tools in experimental chemistry, so I see not much benefit in having these for tools in computational chemistry.
    <advertisement> In addition, a question that legitimately uses such tags probably fits in better at Matter Modeling. If this is up your alley, check it out. It's still quite small a site, but they have very experienced and dedicated users.<\advertisement>
    1. : Yes, quite a bit of computational chemistry can be done in python now. However, for this platform, it is a meta tag. I would argue, that a question which is about the language fits better on a more computationally oriented site. If it is about the chemistry the tool itself becomes meaningless.
    2. : It's a popular visualisation software. There are others. Many. We used to have a tag about visualisation, but got rid of it because it wasn't all that helpful. I don't want to look up a meta post right now, because I'm not sure there is one. I would totally want to get rid of that one.
  • : I honestly have no words for this. But I have not yet cleaned it up, because I wanted you to see.
  • : Ummm, someone didn't find I guess. (Which probably is a story in its own right, but let's not get into that here.)
  • : This might be my personal bias, but I don't think this concept deserves a tag. Also imagine all the retagging it would take to cover only the most prominent questions.
  • : This is probably also my own bias, but is this really necessary.
  • It's one question with both tags, arguably one of those better suited at Matter Modeling. (I don't know, didn't have the time to check.)
  • : There was a discussion about getting rid of . Worth revisiting?
  • to be continued

There was a time where I would have just removed these and had a very open eye for these every time I logged on. I do not have that luxury any more. I'd like to ask the community to keep an eye out for such examples.

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    $\begingroup$ About computation chemistry topics, I am for having one or few general enough tags covering that. As many topics are IMHO rather about "computational aspect of chemistry" than about "chemical aspects of computation". Computation is as well part of modern chemistry as of physics. $\endgroup$ – Poutnik Mar 7 at 20:38
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    $\begingroup$ Yeah it's been a long time since some bigger clean-up of tags, much less serious chat event :( $\endgroup$ – Mithoron Mar 7 at 23:47
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    $\begingroup$ I nuked ghs, labelling, literature and evidence (it was earlier "hoax" + "myth" :D $\endgroup$ – Mithoron Mar 8 at 23:43
  • $\begingroup$ There's a tag for "software". Seems that should cover plenty of ground. $\endgroup$ – Buck Thorn♦ Mar 10 at 17:06
  • $\begingroup$ WOOOOOOO! SPRING BREAK! SHOW US YOUR BITS! $\endgroup$ – Jason C Mar 10 at 20:56
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    $\begingroup$ MATT looks very useful. Is there a way of tracking tag usage in the sense of people actually using them in filters (as opposed to adding them to posts)? Also, I imagine there is a list of substitute tags somewhere? $\endgroup$ – Buck Thorn♦ Mar 11 at 7:05
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    $\begingroup$ @Buck List of synonyms: chemistry.stackexchange.com/tags/synonyms There you can also vote for proposed ones, but well, the system has been kinda broken since it came to 'life'. I don't know about any statistics for uses as filters. Maybe subscribers, or news letter receivers; not sure if that helps. You can see the number of users who favorited the tag though. There are too many possible uses (I guess) to get meaningful data out of this. $\endgroup$ – Martin - マーチン♦ Mar 11 at 22:20
  • $\begingroup$ "They're not rocks they're minerals." Even Marie got that. (YouTube — Breaking bad compilation) $\endgroup$ – andselisk♦ Mar 16 at 18:40

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