Major retag projects

Question

Our top three tags:

• linux
• apache
• windows

Each of those three arguably has some kind of more meaningful version breakdown, and are in effect meta-tags defining which world the question resides in and depends on other tags being present to actually define the question's domain.

Windows has a whole constellation of tags. Apache has three major versions. Linux is the tricky one, and it may be justified in keeping it as a stand-alone even if we do break up Windows and Apache.

Do we want to mass-untag windows and then go through the untagged posts to clean up the remainders? That's 4500+ questions that'll get touched, and a certain unknown percentage will end up as untagged as windows is the only tag on it. This will be a major undertaking, and anyone with 500-rep or more can participate.

Is apache a meta-tag, or is it meaningful? A lot of apache1.3 is still valid for apache2.2, but not all. Do we wish to retag that as well?

The Developers will have to do the mass untag, which will remove windows from all 4500 questions. Everyone else comes in afterwards to retag the untagged questions that will result.

Answer 1

A problem with the Windows tag is that some questions, admittedly not many, apply to all versions of Windows, so it would be rather difficult and possibly quite incorrect to try and retag them with a version specific tag. I don't know if the same applies to the other two.

Answer 2

Just looked over windows and the first 10+ questions I looked at, windows is superfluous and shouldn't have been there in the first place or imprecise and a more specific tag should have been used. Unfortunately I found two where it's appropriate too; so mass untagging would catch them as well. A quick glance at apache shows the same basic trend; most of them should have a more specific tag, or no apache at all; but for a few it's appropriate.

I'd say this is a call that should be made higher up: Is this a priority for our high rep users, to eliminate the meta uses of these tags? Or is the problem so pervasive that we simply accept it.

Answer 3

There's the obvious question that Chris S brings up, but there's also the issue of future preventative maintenance. Generic tags aren't always bad, but won't apply to every case, and as Chris S pointed out, tend to be abused as meta tags. Maybe there could be an extra challenge when asking a question that is tagged with what is deemed to be a generic tag. Something like, "We noticed you used windows as a tag. This is a generic tag that may be too general to be helpful. Please review your tag selection before proceeding." Or something similar.