Well, I did. Because the tag was an awful mess, and is a poor tag to begin with. Related to this thread, of course.
At the start of the year, Server Fault had just shy of 5,200 tags. Think about that for a second. 5,200 tags. And what are tags? They are labels/categories/an organizational aid. By grouping similar things together, you make it easier to find stuff.
Think of the whole thing like putting physical items in boxes, if it helps. If you're organizing something in the physical world (the junk in your house, your desk, your office, whatever) and you use too many boxes to put things in, you don't really help organization, because instead of an unorganized pile of things, you have an unorganized pile of boxes that split things into groups that are too small to be meaningful or useful. On the other hand, if you use too few boxes, you also don't help organization, because instead of one pile of things, you have a bunch of piles of thing with categories that are too big to be be really useful.
So, the key to tagging, as in organizing, labeling, categorizing, etc. is moderation. You need to make your categories big enough to be useful in the task of collecting similar things, and small enough that you're not just grouping dissimilar things into bigger piles. For the purposes of a website, you could probably think of them as topic of conversation. Is cut (the *nix utility) really a category/topic/that's going to be useful to anyone on a generalist sysadmin site? What about data? What about copy? How about http-status-code-408? And yes, these are all real tags that existed as of whenever the hell I got into work this morning. And those aren't even the worst of it.
My favorite really awful tag has been:
So, back to what I was saying about the number of tags Server Fault had a month and a half ago, we had (and still do) have too many boxes that are too small, and in an effort to organize the site, making it more useful and easier to navigate, I'm increasing the box size and decreasing the number of boxes... and well as just smoking a lot of really awful tags. (There is a very substantial minority of people who seem to think tagging consists of putting 5 important words at the bottom of their question, among other atrocities.)
And awful tags is where hpsa comes in. When I came across it for the first time, it had between 20 and 30 questions, meaning it's probably too small and it was being used to mean 4 distinct things, meaning it was confused. The four things were hpsa, the Linux driver, hpsa the RAID controller (HP Smart Array, I guess), hpsa the HP Server Automation tool and hpsa, the HP support assistant (which looks like it's some crap to help end-consumers navigate the abomination HP calls a website). The one thing those four distinct meaning had in common was hp, so that's what the mess got pushed into, in the interests of eliminating a bad category that was doing more harm than good (to the site in general). It had no wiki article or excerpt to explain what it was (and when I swatted it again today, it had no wiki article, or edits pending approval, despite having been around for over 20 minutes), so I smacked it again.
And, for what it's worth, I don't really think that HP Server Automation tool is a big enough topic to be useful as a tag. Looking at the documentation for it, I just don't see that it has any real depth, and is not useful as a category. However, if you still really want it after considering this post (tags are site-wide categories for every visitor, not personal bookmarks), I will give it a chance, provided you do the following: (And this applies to all tags, really)
Name it properly. Follow the hyphen between words convention, and make is as disambiguous as possible. To that note, it should be
hp-[word1]-[word2]
. Tags have a 25 character length limit, which shouldn't be an issue here.hp-server-automation
is 20 characters, so `hp-server-automation-tool' would fit as well.Give it a concise wiki excerpt so people know what you're talking about from the hover text. If more detail is needed, or desired, add it to the tag wiki body. No, the people who need to won't read it (I just got done cleaning up the DOS tag, and despite a proper wiki, and an explicit, ALL CAPS instruction not to use it for Denial of Service, rather than Disk Operating System, more than half the questions were about Denial of Service)... but that's OK. The tags are for the window licking morons who need
halp to be servering
, they're for the people who actually use the site and will benefit from a more organized tagging scheme.Give consideration to whether the tag is a systems administration topic or not, and keep in mind about what I said about striking a balance between not being too narrow in scope, and not being too broad in scope.
Remember, it's a site-wide tag, not a personal bookmark.
Do that, and I'll be happy to leave it alone, at least for a few months, while I concern myself with all the low-hanging fruit that's out there in terms of poor tags and tagging.