59
votes

This post is no longer active. It is preserved for historical reasons only. For more info on our new tag cleanup procedure, see:

The following tags are meta tags (or tags that are too broad or ambiguous) and need to be removed or replaced on some or all questions on which they exist. See the info next to the tag for more information:

In addition, the tag should never exist on any question. It is automatically generated when needed (i.e. when either all tags on a post have been burninated or none of the tags from posts migrated from other sites match tags here).

For a list of other tags that possibly need to go, scroll to the answer section.

Note: Moderators will promote tags from the answers to this question, so our efforts can be focused on a set of few tags at a time. Please do not edit this question with your personal favorites.

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 the help center.

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 and be mindful of front-page flooding – we don't want the entire front page to be filled with edits of old questions. Do five or ten edits at a time, then come back later.

Please edit this question (or any of its answers) and remove each tag when there are no questions left tagged.

9
  • 4
    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
    Commented Jun 10, 2013 at 10:41
  • @slhck In the answer, I've sorted out tags that fit into that second category and that third category. I hope you don't mind. Because rather than favoring tags from a particular category, we should focus equally on the two categories, even though one would take more time to clean up than the other.
    – gparyani
    Commented Jun 24, 2014 at 5:29
  • 1
    @damryfbfnetsi Yeah, that's a good suggestion! I guess the primary effort should be on wiping out the former category before those start to accumulate.
    – slhck Mod
    Commented Jun 24, 2014 at 6:26
  • @slhck So why don't we promote two tags from the first list, and two tags from the second list at a time? How do you like my categorization?
    – gparyani
    Commented Jun 24, 2014 at 6:29
  • @damryfbfnetsi The categorization makes sense. I haven't looked into the lists in detail yet. But for the question: I'd stick to what we have now, and once these are done, pick two tags from each of the categories like you proposed.
    – slhck Mod
    Commented Jun 24, 2014 at 6:31
  • @slhck That's the way it is right now :)
    – gparyani
    Commented Jun 24, 2014 at 6:32
  • @slhck Oh, and did you notice the disambiguation about "need to be removed" and the paragraph about untagged that I added?
    – gparyani
    Commented Jun 24, 2014 at 6:34
  • @damryfbfnetsi I did. And you're right, there shouldn't be any untagged questions, so while people are at it…
    – slhck Mod
    Commented Jun 24, 2014 at 6:39
  • RIP Tag cleanup for month threads. All hail meta.superuser.com/questions/8123/a-new-way-to-clean-up-tags
    – Sathyajith Bhat Mod
    Commented Jun 24, 2014 at 9:18

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
26
votes

The following tags were uncovered in the audit and may also need disambiguation or deletion. Please evaluate these tags and add suggestions for alternatives! We will promote tags that should be cleaned up to the actual question.

The following tags don't have very many questions tagged, but could be misused in the future. If promoted, they should be removed preemptively to avoid future misuse:

The following tags already have lots of questions tagged and need lots of community effort to remove or replace. If promoted, make your contributions, because every little bit-by-bit contribution counts!

11
  • 2
    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
    Commented Mar 4, 2013 at 17:53
  • 3
    What's wrong with [networking] specifically?
    – cpast
    Commented Mar 13, 2013 at 2:36
  • @cpast it's unclear in its use. It consistently refers to about 3 different things, last I checked.
    – Aarthi Staff
    Commented Mar 13, 2013 at 17:34
  • 1
    I'd like to know what [high-definition] should be replaced with please?
    – tomByrer
    Commented Jul 7, 2013 at 14:05
  • Agreed for [batch] - it should be [batch-processing] because we already have [batch-file] and [batch] is being mis-used, despite the definition
    – Raystafarian
    Commented Jul 28, 2013 at 19:27
  • I removed a couple of tags from the list that are specific enough for us, e.g. [sleep], [hibernate], [suspend].
    – slhck Mod
    Commented Aug 23, 2013 at 18:26
  • I just looked at [Receiver] there there were no posts left tagged with that.
    – Hennes
    Commented Oct 2, 2013 at 17:18
  • developer-tools have been cleaned up, tags changed to more appropriate ones where applicable. There are just two left which had the edits reverted: superuser.com/questions/656173/…, superuser.com/questions/635917/…
    – MoonSire
    Commented Nov 13, 2013 at 7:10
  • tiling has been cleared except for one locked question superuser.com/questions/597090/vim-like-window-manager
    – user201262
    Commented Apr 2, 2014 at 15:05
  • [freeze] and [crash] seem identical, both in question subjects and in tag summary. I suggest that [crash] be a synonym of [freeze] (I would, if I had the requirements)
    – Doktoro Reichard
    Commented Jun 24, 2014 at 1:28
  • I've sorted out the fairly new, not often-used tags from the very often-used (i.e. overused) tags.
    – gparyani
    Commented Jun 24, 2014 at 5:31
12
votes

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.

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.

->

->

->

->

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

. I suggest merging to . See here.

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

is ambiguous and could be stated in question.

->

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

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

- questions about Windows user profiles seem quite numerous, perhaps should be a separate tag.

. Some of these could be merged into

->

1
  • 2
    I think a good tag may be not good alone, but in combination with others. I for myself prefer something like "filter", "excel" or "filter", "email" instead of "excel-filter" or "email-filter". So both tags get a deeper sense when combined.
    – Adrian
    Commented Nov 1, 2013 at 14:48
3
votes

I think we need to sort out these - they clearly overlap:

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