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What to do when some tag was created with an obvious meaning, but later on took a different meaning entirely? For example, tag. It was created as "CorelDraw file extension", but later on used as "CD-R Disk" by two users.

I think the proper course of action is:

  1. Create "cd-r" tag.
  2. Retag two questions.
  3. Add descriptions to both tags.

But I'm not sure, maybe if a tag took a new meaning, the original one does not matter?

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I went ahead and performed the modifications above, so the "evidence" is not there anymore. – haimg Oct 11 '11 at 20:51
and of course, when in doubt the tag wiki takes precedence, so when creating a new tag, those would need to be filled up. – Journeyman Geek Oct 12 '11 at 0:48
@JourneymanGeek: I took care of that. – haimg Oct 12 '11 at 0:51

1 Answer

up vote 12 down vote accepted

In this case

You're absolutely right, even though only a single question uses the tag as referring to the file extension.

The leading dot makes it clear that it refers to a file extension, so there's absolutely no way it could stand for something else (as long as there's no well-known Unix dot file, like , by that name). It's likely just an accident due to suggestions in tag name autocompletion.

More generally

It depends on what is considered on-topic on the site, and what's the more common interpretation on this site. We recently had this with , which usually stood for keyboard/video/mouse switches, but more recently also stands for kernel-based virtual machine. Ubuntu.SE or Unix.SE will most likely judge differently.

It's not always what was earlier though: I believe virtual memory is (at least in consumer computing) older than virtual machines, but uses of almost always refer to the latter.

I also remember a discussion about (Serial Attached SCSI and a statistics program). Questions about either are usually better suited for other Stack sites though.

It's possible that a (rarely used) tag has its meaning changed when a new technology or product comes along, especially if there's no tag wiki. But the community of Meta.SU must decide about ambiguous tags case by case.

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More recent example, with at least 8 questions asked about the .NET implementation before the first audio question came along. In this case, using mono-framework for the .NET implementation questions probably makes sense. – Daniel Beck♦ Nov 10 '11 at 15:02

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