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We don't like company-only tags, and there's been various crusades in the past to purge them:

Unlike a specific product, a company does not represent an area of expertise. Someone could be an expert in one product, but have no idea about another. is a prime example of this, with Office, OS, Apps, Phone and other software & hardware to cover, it's likely an expert in one does not necessarily make them an expert in other areas.

Is this something that we consider a problem? If so, break out the pitchforks!

  • In some cases, the questions should be retagged to more specific product tags
  • In others, the tag should simply be removed outright.

There are more than the few I've listed below, so feel free to add them as you find them.

Tags Found:

Tags Burned/Removed:

Note: Please occasionally re-check this list to see if any tags were recreated, and if so, move the tag to the "Found" list above.

Tags Synonymised/Merged:

These tags were cleaned up then renamed or merged to the primary topic area:

Tags Blocked:

Due to persistent recreation, the following tags have been protected against recreation:

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  • 1
    if we need to add precision why not just scrap nvidia for geforce, tegra etc., ati for radeon, intel for xeon etc. but what about xeon-phi etc. i3, i5, i7, and then we add too many tags and we start a new post about disposing of them and recondensing (best case) or the stackexchange server gets eaten by this rather peckish dinosaur (imgs.xkcd.com/comics/birds_and_dinosaurs.png) whose comic is actually worryingly related slightly to the point of my comment (worst case).
    – user187717
    Commented Aug 22, 2014 at 16:57
  • There is little reason to have separate rages for Xeon,i3,i5,i7 they are all intel CPUs
    – Ramhound
    Commented Aug 23, 2014 at 0:29
  • 8
    @saleemrashid1 - I dont think we should need that level of detail, but [intel-cpu], [intel-graphics], [intel-network-card], [intel-ssd] etc would be solid topic areas (note, I chose these examples based on the first 10 or so questions I saw in the [intel] tag)
    – Robotnik
    Commented Aug 24, 2014 at 1:24
  • 1
    @DanielBeck Is there a way to make it so tags that we decide are banned can't be recreated?
    – soandos
    Commented Aug 25, 2014 at 23:56
  • 1
    @soandos: In theory, yes. In practice it's rarely done. Don't think dozens of company tags qualify.
    – Daniel Beck Mod
    Commented Aug 26, 2014 at 2:28
  • 1
    malwarebytes is about the company, but should probably have a synonym made to malwarebytes-anti-malware
    – Canadian Luke
    Commented Sep 3, 2014 at 20:46
  • 2
    I think we should rename msi into windows-installer-package. It is used for two different meanings: the installer package files (the clearly defined meaning), and the company (the frequently-misunderstood meaning). But first, we've got to remove the tag from questions that use the latter meaning.
    – gparyani
    Commented Sep 17, 2014 at 14:44
  • 2
    @RobinHood From what I can see, it's misused by many people for the company. Not everyone sees the tag wikis. This is why I hate double-meaning tags.
    – gparyani
    Commented Sep 21, 2014 at 5:09
  • 2
    @Robotnik - If tags keep coming back, why not leave the tag in the index with a wiki excerpt that it is deprecated and should not be used, along with what the appropriate tags are?
    – fixer1234
    Commented Nov 17, 2014 at 0:46
  • 2
    @fixer1234 - If a tag has no questions, it is purged from the system - tag wiki and all. as Braiam notes, we could blacklist them if they become a serious problem, but they're not at that stage yet.
    – Robotnik
    Commented Nov 17, 2014 at 0:56
  • 1
    [HTC] cleaned with the exception of one question which is closed and which I cannot edit.
    – Hennes
    Commented Feb 7, 2016 at 19:04
  • 1
    [Dell] mostly cleaned. 7 questions remaining for which a mortal user cannot edit the tags.
    – Hennes
    Commented Jul 15, 2016 at 7:18
  • 1
    Nope. I guess I could raise 7 flags (or even one and mention all 7 in them). Will do so now.
    – Hennes
    Commented Jul 15, 2016 at 7:32
  • 1
    @Nordlys the occasional edit should be fine, just don't overload the review queue with 10+ pending edits :-)
    – Robotnik
    Commented Oct 1, 2018 at 23:08
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    Hey folks, I've removed [status-planned] from this for now. It's clearly still active though, and I would encourage you to keep using this post as you have been - the tag change is just a paper alteration.
    – Slate StaffMod
    Commented Jun 24 at 16:50

7 Answers 7

Reset to default
55

Only manufacturer and company tags are problematic, specific products are not.

There are two tags, and , that are okay for all CPU and graphics card products made by Intel Corporation.

Nvidia is also kind of a special case. Nvidia's only products (or at least their most popular products, since I haven't heard of anything else) are their graphics cards. Over-atomization of the topic would be counterproductive since you would need a tag for each product on the Nvidia line.

To prevent the broken window of, "Why I can't use as a tag, but we have an tag?", let's rename it to , or something else. The objective is that it won't be a company tag, but a product tag.

As a side note (and while I added this, the post's vote tallies were +12/-0), I would not only eradicate these tags, but blacklist them, since they keep coming back.

7
  • This makes sense. Many people are gonna type in the company name so if existing tags already support the name it will just show up in the search results. You just have to be careful to define the product name as synonyms if there aren't any product-specific tags. Also I have a doubt. If a tag is burned, can it be risen from its ashes at a later date? Wouldn't the burninator block it and/or provide a list of alternatives to show the user?
    – ADTC
    Commented Aug 23, 2014 at 18:37
  • 2
    Nvidia has made chipsets in the past.
    – kinokijuf
    Commented Aug 27, 2014 at 10:12
  • 4
    What about NVIDIA Tegra ARM chips?
    – gparyani
    Commented Aug 29, 2014 at 21:53
  • 1
    @damryfbfnetsi they are CPU's right? nvidia-cpu.
    – Braiam
    Commented Aug 30, 2014 at 0:13
  • 10
    [nvidia-gpu] and [nvidia-cpu] would make sense
    – user1306322
    Commented Aug 30, 2014 at 15:28
  • Other Stackexchange site: Askubuntu is considering how to handle the company tags here meta.askubuntu.com/q/15996/25388 Can you please participate in the discussion and justify it. - - Which are the main points why you moved away from manufacturer & company tags? - - I feel it weird that you put everything related to asus under asus, leading to unspecific content and low-quality threads, having much duplicate threads/answers.
    – Léo Léopold Hertz 준영
    Commented Aug 29, 2016 at 22:45
  • 1
    @Masi everything I could say, was said here meta.askubuntu.com/q/7733/169736
    – Braiam
    Commented Aug 29, 2016 at 23:09
15

I thought I might give an overview of what was done with , as the list in the question doesn't do it any favours, and I hope it serves as an example of what we can do and get some feedback as to whether it was the right way to go:

The tag already existed, so retagging questions seemed a good place to start.

Based on that, I created , and began retagging those as well.

As the topics got smaller (looking at you, touchpad and presenter) I wasn't sure whether we should create the newer tags. I did so anyway for the time being, if only to remove from them.

Final stats

Question Count

Total: 161

General Cleanup

  • Questions put on hold: 2
  • Old, long-closed Questions flagged & removed: 5
  • Tag Wikis and Excerpts Edited/Created: 1 edited, 8 created
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  • 1
    Ancient post; just to add a thought: a manufacturer tag adds value only when there is something unique to those products or to the required solutions. Logitech wireless devices use a proprietary wireless interface, so that's a case where the company-specific tag is valuable. At the other extreme, Logitech speakers aren't different in any way from other brands, so [logitech-speakers] is a bad tag because it will attract fewer answerers than [computer-speakers]. Some of the over-granularity might be better handled by eliminating the tag or replacing it with a more generic one. But good approach.
    – fixer1234
    Commented Jul 23, 2019 at 22:57
  • 2
    @fixer1234 - Better late than never! When editing these years ago, my thought process was that while logitech hardware might be no different to other branded hardware, my experience with logitech is that it tends to come bundled with configuration/setup tools, branded 'helper' software and drivers, and therefore having dedicated tags for them would help people find answers to common issues mainly from the software side rather than hardware specifically.
    – Robotnik
    Commented Jul 24, 2019 at 0:26
5

While going through the questions I came across one with a .

Konica are a manufacturer of printers, scanners, etc. (I think they have a heavy industry division as well).

There are only a few (about 6) questions using this so I will run through them quickly and remove it.

UPDATE

Konica is no more!

1
  • I have added it to the list of tags that have been removed in the question :)
    – Robotnik
    Commented Aug 18, 2016 at 1:45
4

Even after we destroy tags, they can be recreated. I just re-torched ; it had accumulated four questions in a couple weeks. You can see a list of newly invented tags on the "new" tab of the tags page. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty good tags.

1
  • As of today, the ASUS tag is applied to 89 questions.
    – music2myear
    Commented Sep 3 at 14:47
4

I posted a solution to here, which has received two upvotes and no downvotes. I started retagging, and then someone pointed out that being under 2k rep, my retagging uses 4x the effort of someone 2k or above, so I've stopped, at least for now. I'd be happy to finally get rid of this tag.

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    Usually, a majority of the questions have an obvious solution (on many questions, the tag is unnecessary decoration, or the alternate tags are clear). Any ambitious 2K+ user can go through most of those pretty quickly. But we get down to a small number of remaining questions where some subject matter knowledge is required. For those cases, if a <2K user has the knowledge and wants to volunteer to tackle it, more power to them. (cont'd)
    – fixer1234
    Commented Oct 2, 2018 at 2:14
  • 2
    I was able to knock out 54 of them, which will minimize the review requirement. This isn't my area, so there are 34 left where I'm not familiar enough to know whether particular ones are general networking questions, general hardware questions, or which specific Mikrontik product they refer to. They've been sitting there for awhile and no 2K+ user has tackled them yet. I noticed that you had answered many on the questions in the list. If you want to volunteer, go for it. It looks like the only way they will get cleaned up in the near future. And thanks. :-)
    – fixer1234
    Commented Oct 2, 2018 at 6:13
2

It is a fact that some companies have similar issues across many of their products from same category. Some people who happen to have some connection to said company's support service might be interested in quickly looking up by combination company name + product category. Same for people who whould want to find if any other TV (product category) by Toshiba (company name) have similar problems.

I think it is a bad move. What do you GAIN from removing this information? What you LOSE if it stays?

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  • 3
    If you do a search with multiple terms, like toshiba and tv, you will get all questions that contain both terms, so you don't lose that ability based on tags. For the most common type of tag usage, using a generic tag like [toshiba] or multiple generic tags, like [toshiba] plus [tv], gets you every question that has either tag, so Toshiba TVs are lost in the deluge.
    – fixer1234
    Commented Nov 28, 2014 at 16:34
  • 3
    @Oleg - Your first point is absolutely spot on, and is the crux of what Braiam wrote above, and what I did for [logitech]. we should have product-line tags like [toshiba-tv], which would adequately categorise questions as you describe. Unfortunately, tags with one question are automatically purged from the system in 6 months, therefore the minimum-viable question count for a tag is at least 2. If we had multiple [Toshiba] questions about Toshiba televisions, I would've tagged them [toshiba-tv] - so far, yours was the only one I saw.
    – Robotnik
    Commented Nov 28, 2014 at 23:24
  • Given just a product tag like tv, a search for [tv] toshiba should produce exactly the results you're looking for in your example. What tags add are advice on categorization and the ability for area experts to follow them, but as noted by the OP, a company name isn't a useful tag to follow.
    – cjs
    Commented Aug 3, 2019 at 11:07
-3

I think company tags is good because with multiple tags it will be clear which technology you ask about with which company implementation for that technology.

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