So... [Normally][1], I would [collect some data][2] on how many tags are created by users at various rep levels, and how they were used. This is a pretty decent way to gauge whether anything of value would be lost if the privilege were bumped up.

I *started* to do that here. The results looked good - barely any tags created by low-rep users, a slam-dunk [meta-tag:status-completed]. Then I ran the numbers on tags created by *high-rep* users, and things got weird: they weren't creating very many tags either; in fact, I counted only 87 tags created here during the last year by *anyone*. That seemed... Odd. So I went to do the last check: how many tags were *destroyed* during this time-period.

I found that only a hundred or so had been destroyed by the system due to low/no use. However... In the past couple weeks, over **1400** tags have been merged, mostly into [this big ball of mud](http://serverfault.com/questions/tagged/off-topic).

That... Pretty much makes doing any further analysis right now worthless. It'd be *really nice* if we tracked information on deleted tags, such as who created them and so on... But we don't. 

All I know is that *of the extant tags* created during the past year, there's not a very significant split between low-rep and high-rep users; the [only new tag to garner more than a few questions](http://serverfault.com/questions/tagged/off-topic) did so via merges and will be destroyed itself - if new tags must be created in the process, that will only skew this analysis further.

Marking this [meta-tag:status-deferred] - please [get rid of this tag](http://serverfault.com/questions/tagged/off-topic) as quickly as possible, and then remind me to check again in another few months to see who is actually creating useful tags here.

###Update 

Over a month later, that tag was still around. So I've removed it with extreme prejudice. [There is some cleanup to do](http://serverfault.com/questions/tagged/untagged) in a tag that *cannot* be added to new questions or ignored when editing old. 

I will revisit the tag-creation privilege in approximately six months, by which time we should have sufficient evidence of need.




  [1]: http://meta.superuser.com/questions/8149/raise-the-minimum-rep-needed-to-create-new-tags/8230#8230
  [2]: http://meta.physics.stackexchange.com/questions/5616/raising-the-privilege-limit-for-tag-creation-from-300-to-1k/5620#5620