9

I feel we have more question here than what would be good (at least it's my personal idea).

Is it possible to make creation of tags more controlled (/ difficult,) by...

  • increasing reputation required?
  • have a review process for new tags?
  • (setting up quality requirements - e.g. at 100 characters of description for a newly created tag?)

While I'm writing this question I've found this great asnwer, which explains background, however, I'm not really sure how effective those actions are.

3
  • Completely agree, this would prevent new questions being created with the obsolete tags.
    – Burgi
    Aug 15, 2016 at 13:02
  • Maybe if we increase the rep required to create tags to 2.5k, in line with creating tag synonyms. I'm not sure how a review process would work though.
    – Burgi
    Aug 15, 2016 at 13:09
  • related meta.stackexchange.com/questions/62591/… Aug 25, 2016 at 10:48

2 Answers 2

8

I think either a review process for new tags could be a good thing.

Alternatively could we just make entering the tag description (short & long) mandatory and put all these in the review queue.

That way we end up with a (hopefully) good tag description and the creator is forced to think about it while creating the tag.

2
  • I should have searched. It was a safe bet that this was not the first time it was asked. Still, the problem still exists. (at least in my humble opinion).
    – Hennes
    Aug 15, 2016 at 13:15
  • 2
    Totally agree. Often wondered why any tag could be created without review, but to add any guidance or wiki required it.
    – CharlieRB
    Aug 15, 2016 at 15:58
6

There actually is kind of a way to review new tags. Users with more than 10K reputation have a "tools" page that shows, among other things, the most recently created tags. Those can be found at the bottom of the main stats section. It shows how many questions have each tag mentioned, and as one would expect, clicking a tag goes to the list of questions tagged with it.

newest tags

I just destroyed the tag by retagging its one question with the existing tag.

It's worth noting that on Stack Overflow, the "create tags" privilege requires 1500 rep, while here it only takes 300. If we can show that we're getting too many pointless new tags, the moderators can petition Stack Exchange to bump up that privilege level for us. (A lot of the bad tags we're looking at are fairly old.)

2
  • Your point about old tags cam be true, I couldn't check it. Aug 16, 2016 at 4:48
  • I do peruse the new tags pretty often and remove weak ones by retagging - they should get cleaned up as having no questions by whatever task SE runs. So yes, this is a useful thing to do. Aug 25, 2016 at 10:46

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .