up vote 30 down vote favorite
6

Hoping to make this into a recurring affair.

Following tags are meta tags (what is this?), need to be removed/made synonyms

Important

Do not flag/vote to close for migration; many of them are too old, too highly upvoted, just plain crap, or out of scope according to their FAQ.

Remember, we don't migrate crap.

In this case, as mentioned above, cast your vote for closure and/or deletion and also flag for moderator attention and we'll review it.

Pro-tip #1

If you are removing tags from a massive number of questions, it's better to go to the last question on the last page of all questions with that tag and work your way backwards. This prevents you from having to deal with the cache not reflecting your edits on the question list combined with browser-cache issues.

If you haven't visited most of these questions, you'll know what you changed because the link for the question will have a different color.

Pro-tip #2

Please edit in small batches & be mindful of front-page flooding - we don't want the entire front page to be filled with edits of old questions.

Please edit the question and remove each tag when done.

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@TomWijsman server doesn't mean anything, there's no significance to adding it. What type of server is it? Is it about server configuration or troubleshooting? Webserver? Media server? DB server? proxy server? etc etc – Sathya♦ Oct 18 '12 at 5:18
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So just to be clear (since I haven't participated in one of these before), anyone who wants to help can just take a tag from the list above and start going through questions, removing/replacing the tag and editing/voting/flagging as necessary? – Indrek Oct 18 '12 at 7:34
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@Indrek that is correct. Please keep in mind pro-tip #2! – Sathya♦ Oct 18 '12 at 10:38
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@Sathya: Yet, it doesn't seem like it can be easily removed from all questions, so we might want to look into which tags we replace them. To me, it means that the question will be about servers and not about clients. "Server" means "a computer that provides dedicated services", so it does mean something. – Tom Wijsman Oct 18 '12 at 12:02
Why do you call them “meta tags”? – Scott Oct 18 '12 at 23:22
@Scott - from this blog post you can’t tell what the question is about unless they’re paired with some other tag (or several of them). – Sathya♦ Oct 19 '12 at 4:34
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@Sathya: I see.  Like [Microsoft], [automation], and [troubleshooting], each of which is so general that it probably applies to > 30% of the questions.  Or like [client], which is about as informative as [server].  Or like [file], [directory], [folder], [path], [64-bit], and [cpu].  (I’ve got more.) – Scott Oct 23 '12 at 0:30
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[directory] <--> [folder] seems like a good candidate for merging... – Tom Wijsman Oct 24 '12 at 22:52
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Really wanting to sound like an asset, and not an asset-et, but I do have a question on the server tag. I support Scotts point, and would go further the other way. Are we supposed to have tags for email servers, web servers, VPN server... wait those don't include the OS. So to try again, OS X email server, Microsoft email server... wait would that be Outlook server? And what do I do with Linux/Unix email servers? How disambiguous do we need to go creating tags? – Everett Nov 27 '12 at 6:59
"Please edit the question and remove each tag as and when done." and when done what??? – Ian Carroll Apr 13 at 18:51
@IanCarroll when done editing, "when done" just means "when finished". – terdon Jun 8 at 19:56
Just wanted to say, regarding the [google]+[search] tags - I went through all of them couple of months ago and retagged them to [google-search]. I see there are a lot of new questions tagged wrongly again, so maybe we should add a note about that in the tags description or remove the [google] tag already. I really think it's time to take care of company tags already: meta.superuser.com/q/3948/165729 – tempy Jun 10 at 10:41

7 Answers

up vote 10 down vote

The following tags require more scrubbing or TLC before they are eligible for burnination:

  • -- needs manual cleanup to differentiate between audio and video recording, as well as disambiguation for screen recording and other types of capture.
  • -- many of these questions appear to have been tagged with "X server" thereby using TWO tags instead of one, hyphenated one. Needs a more careful examination.
  • - check if it refers to specific browser debugging plugin or just a request for a tool

The following tags appear suspicious and require a careful scrubbing:

The following tags were uncovered in the audit and may also need cleaning, scrubbing and/or burnination. Please evaluate these tags and create a new burnination request.

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What does "appear suspicious and require a careful scrubbing" mean? [audio] & [networking] seem pretty useful and clear tags. – tempy Jan 2 at 20:51
@tempy When I was cycling through them, I felt they should be merged into other tags that they always appear with. file-transfer and ftp are a good example. Either way, they dinged on my radar during the audit; they could probably use a little poking. :) – Aarthi Jan 2 at 22:26
What's wrong with developer-tools ? – Zombies Jan 18 at 5:24
@Zombies If I had to hazard a guess -- it's not self-evident what it refers to. It's an exceedingly broad term that is better served by having people tag the specific dev tool they're asking about. But I'm not really certain; we'd have to ask Sathya. – Aarthi Jan 18 at 8:00
Could not remove [system-administration] from this question. – DJDavid98 Jan 25 at 17:23
I removed most of the questions tagged with tags from the first part. Some of them are awaiting moderation. If anyone whats to remove the reputation I got, feel free to. I'm not sure if I'm supposed to keep it or not? --- Also, [read] tag is cleared already, I would suggest removing it. – DJDavid98 Jan 25 at 17:41
@DJDavid98 Unused tags are garbage-collected after a while. – Daniel Beck♦ Jan 26 at 7:51
@DanielBeck From this list, I mean. – DJDavid98 Jan 26 at 11:27
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Only about 7 posts I found tagged "raw" do not refer to either RAW image format or raw block storage devices. I do not see how either of these can be detagged but perhaps they can be disambiguated to "raw-filesystem" and "raw-image-format"? – washbow Mar 4 at 17:53
have you seen meta.superuser.com/questions/6466/… ? – Griffin Mar 9 at 5:47
What's wrong with [networking] specifically? – cpast Mar 13 at 2:36
@cpast it's unclear in its use. It consistently refers to about 3 different things, last I checked. – Aarthi Mar 13 at 17:34
up vote 5 down vote

More meta tags that can be removed:

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More and more useless tags by the day. I like this uncovering, but I have no idea how to get rid of all of them without more people to actively help. – slhck♦ Jan 9 at 21:04
@slhck I keep finding them without even looking for them...I really appreciate your help but I guess we need more people on this. Can we get this some attention (tag cleaning in general)? – tempy Jan 9 at 21:56
@slhck Can I go ahead and remove the [static] tag from noise & audio related questions (static noise / static audio)? I think [noise] is enough - I'm trying to clean the [static] meta tag. – tempy Jan 13 at 16:37
Sure, makes sense. You could just remove "static" from the questions that aren't about noise, and then I'll merge the remainder into "noise". That'd be less work. – slhck♦ Jan 13 at 16:45
@slhck Is it possible to add some of the tags I mentioned that you think should be removed to the main post, so more people will see them? Maybe just the big ones, like configuration and customization? – tempy Feb 26 at 16:21
Go ahead! I featured the question. – slhck♦ Feb 26 at 17:20
If you're planning to get rid of "customization" and its synonym "customize", how about "custom" as well? Equally useless IMO. – Karan Feb 27 at 7:16
@Karan I agree. I wasn't aware that [custom] exists. – tempy Mar 1 at 21:47
I'm taking care of move. – user 99572 is fine Mar 4 at 13:13
I'll go over [hide]. – amiregelz Mar 5 at 8:27
move removed – user 99572 is fine Mar 8 at 13:22
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I would suggest changing [static] to [esd] to use the proper name. I can't create tags yet, but if someone can do that and add this text to the tag wiki: Electrostatic discharge (ESD) is the sudden flow of electricity between two objects caused by contact, an electrical short, or dielectric breakdown. One of the causes of ESD events is static electricity which is generated by for example walking on a rug, rubbing a plastic comb against dry hair, rubbing a balloon against a sweater, ascending from a fabric car seat, or removing some types of plastic packaging. – MoonSire Apr 10 at 12:12
up vote 3 down vote

How about removing ? Looks like a meta tag to me. Way too generic.

Should be either related to automation, batch file, or some other more pertinent thing like the scripting language the command is for.

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up vote 3 down vote

Oh and I spotted this tag today, this needs to be removed too !

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Well, what are you waiting for? ;) – user 99572 is fine Mar 6 at 22:38
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Done! It is gone. I also removed dos2unix. – Feral Oink Apr 24 at 9:43
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@FeralOink What's wrong with dos2unix? It's specific, and wasn't even a month old based on the post you edited. – Daniel Beck♦ Apr 24 at 12:56
up vote 1 down vote

There are three questions tagged .

According to criteria in the tag wiki for , that tag shouldn't be used for MS Windows command line related questions. Since all three of these are Windows command line related questions (!), I will remove the dos tag from each. Based on my reading of the DOS-related tag wiki's, I infer that you don't want questions tagged with generic DOS, but rather, variety-specific e.g. .

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While I agree with your sentiments, I think the whole "Oh, the command prompt is still MS-DOS" notion isn't going to go away for the average user for some time to come... That being said, I did have a look through the ms-dos tag, and many are indeed about MS-DOS and not Windows utilities. In the latter case, I agree that the tag should just be removed. – Breakthrough May 10 at 19:37
up vote 1 down vote

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is my de facto standard of what a good tag is.

A good tag is a short, concise, word or phrase that describes what a certain group of questions have in common for the efficiency of searches for a certain topic.

I have seen many tags that combine unrelated topics, such as Excel and audio. I think that I would change this tag if it was being used in this situation.

Anyway, I decided that I might be able to help out with this hunt for bad tags, so here are some tags that I think should be deleted/changed and why.

- no explanation needed :))

- useless

move to (it is also used almost always with "memory")

is quite vague - it is used in the context of memory, excel, email, and text sorting.

is not very useful but I'm not too sure about this one.

is used with video, sound, and Excel. I think it is not useful. From titles it is obvious that the question is "editing"- related.

->

->

->

->

this is an ambiguous tag. Could refer to PATA or Integrated Development Environment. Suggest merging of the PATA-related tags to

suggest merging to . See here.

is not a useful tag. Does not refer to the company Gigabyte, if you were wondering.

this tag is ambiguous and could be stated in question.

->

this could be merged into . I see no clear reason to differentiate between these tags.

not very helpful as a tag. See my definition above.

is ambiguous.

some of these could be merged into

->

cmon... I know this is a computer forum but...

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up vote 0 down vote

seems ambiguous, could mean Acrobat Reader, a Firefox View type, Barcode/Smart Card Reader, etc.

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