The Debian community will know that [tag:squeeze] is version 6 and [tag:sarge] is 3.1. Similarly the Ubuntu community will know that [tag:natty-narwhal] (natty) is 11.04 and [tag:hardy-heron] (hardy) is 8.04.

If I asked a question about Windows 6.1.7601 or 6.0.6002 would you know which is on topic ?

The important thing is that their respective communities know what they mean. It's not broken so don't try and fix it.

I did some research

The people over on askubuntu.sx have both sets of tags but prefer the numbers. Checking the ubuntu* tags here on SF we have all the main descriptive tags synonym to numbers already. 

Debian is slightly different in that most of the tags are descriptive. There is [tag:debian-5.0] which should probably be synonymed to [tag:debian-lenny] and there is [tag:debian6] which should probably be renamed [tag:debian-6.0] and then synonymed to [tag:debian-squeeze]

Other stuff to do to make things consistent

[tag:lenny] -> [tag:debian-lenny]


This would at least clean things up and make things consistent within the parish of debian who seem to prefer the descriptive names.