Inspired by bad-tag-cleanup project by our awesome mod, here I suggest the idea to cleanup duplicate tags:
- Different by one or hyphen, for example port-forwarding vs portforwarding and mod-security vs modsecurity
- Plural/singular variaton, for example socket vs sockets and headers vs header
This idea was duplicate of inspired by this thread in MSO: Clean up of run-together/hyphenated and singular/plural tags.
Currently, SE has mechanism to prevent tag creation that differ only in hyphenation or pluralization. But some tags was slipped before this idea was implemented.
In the past, we have some merge request for these tags for example:
Now, we can use powerful query from Stack Exchange Data Explorer (forked from the original query) to search all the tags and clean them.
For guidelines, I'll quote it from original thread
First decide whether the tags really mean the same thing. There are false positives in this list. windows and window have nothing to do with each other. Most of the hits are good, though.
If the tag names really mean the same thing, decide which name to keep. There are several general principles:
- For multi-word tags, a hyphen is preferred.
- There is no consensus for plural vs. singular for nouns. This old thread very weakly suggest the singular, and among popular pairs the singular is dominant, but recent practice tends towards plural.
If it has been decided that a tag T2 should be merged into a tag T1, then:
- If there are a lot of occurrences of T2, suggest or vote for a tag synonym, which will eventually lead to the tags being merged.
- If there are only a handful of occurrences of T1, then we can get rid of T1 manually.
Several things that I would like to discuss are
- For point 2, how do we decide which plural vs. singular tag that should stay? By opening a meta question for every tag pairs? By post count? Or what?
- For Point 3, doing self mass-retagging would be cluttered the front page. And looks like our mods have a tool to do mass retagging (without bump the question) and synonymizer tool. So, did regular user allowed to do retagging or can we rely on our mods to do it?
I've listed all the affected tag pairs in two answers below. Posting the list in this question will make this question become TLDR-type. Feel free to edit it or bring it to meta to discussing whether the tag pairs should be kept or not.
hostis a great example). It usually makes my life easier to keep avoid merging these tags together into a bigger group until I'm done filtering through for questions that need to be moved out... so if it take a while, well, that's because it's going to take a while to get the site's tags into any semblance of usefulness. As they say, Rome wasn't tagged in a day.