19

We had about 4-5 users who were actively/obviously cleaning up, and at least one complaint of over efficiency.

How was tag cleanup weekend?

More specifically, if you were involved, what tags did you clean up?

If you weren't - How disruptive was it?

In general - are there any other improvements we can do? Should we be doing this monthly?

7
  • I think that this should be featured for some time. Additionally, I've suggested edits to the tag wiki for the new tag tag-cleanup-weekends.
    – gparyani
    Sep 29, 2014 at 1:41
  • 15 minutes later, the question is actually showing up as featured.
    – gparyani
    Sep 29, 2014 at 1:59
  • When does the Community user remove the featured tag? I feel like it's unnecessary now.
    – gparyani
    Oct 1, 2014 at 15:54
  • @damryfbfnetsi I think it's after 30 days (as it says in the first paragraph here) Oct 1, 2014 at 16:24
  • You need to update Aisle 3's bio, because it still says that the tag cleanup is going on...
    – gparyani
    Oct 2, 2014 at 15:27
  • @JourneymanGeek - Are we planning another weekend soon?
    – Robotnik
    Oct 21, 2014 at 0:26
  • The original plan was to run it every other month. I'll get the organisational matters up soon - I'm currently super busy IRL.
    – Journeyman Geek Mod
    Oct 21, 2014 at 0:47

5 Answers 5

13

Well, as the person who instigated this...

The nice things

  • It's an easy way to earn tagging related badges.
  • It's about the only way to tackle a popular metatag - We killed off size, which had something like 400 uses.
  • It helps you find anomalies - For example, that users keep using when they mean

The annoying things

  • Front page flooding (but that can't be helped)

The things we can do better

  • I was hoping for more low rep users to take part. We had a few but not many.
  • We probably should have done better on review queues
  • We had users roll back some edits - do we need better education, or just go meh.
  • We actually have meta tags that need clearing in this manner!

Some personal statistics

I killed off the following tags

While not all of these were in the list, they were very obviously ambiguous and meta tags, and shared tags with my primary targets. I also did a handful of deletions where needed, mostly of closed/on hold questions, often with no votes involved or no accepted answer.

With in my estimation over 500 edits, mostly on Saturday. I identified a bunch of possible meta tags and other tags which I will be trickling into meta for action over time.

4
  • Nice man. I unfortunately didn't have much weekend to play around with, although beforehand I did remove [msi] (company uses), and Oliver synonymised the rest with [windows-installer].
    – Robotnik
    Sep 29, 2014 at 5:43
  • "Front page flooding (but that can't be helped)": I have never understood why the meta SE people are against adding some option such as "minor edit" to prevent this from happening when cleaning... That is ridiculous. Oct 19, 2014 at 15:22
  • @FranckDernoncourt Or a check-box you can tick when you edit that says "I don't want a question bump for this". Oct 20, 2014 at 7:43
  • 3
    Its been asked if that could be instated as a privilege I think. I found that deleting, editing and reopening seems to work, but that feels like a gross abuse of the system.
    – Journeyman Geek Mod
    Oct 20, 2014 at 7:44
10

I think the cleanup weekend went well!

We added the tag to around 6 questions:

You might think that's hardly anything, but that was 11 tags emptied in just 2 days!

Annoyances

  • 20 second edit limit
  • can't help with the suggested reviews queue after 20 times
  • front page flooding

Personally, I helped with the , , and tags (nowhere near as much as @JourneymanGeek :)

1
  • The problem is, given that the suggested edits queue has a max capacity of 200, it will never hit the minimum 1000 required to extend the number of reviews per person per day to 40. Also, if it gets full, everyone is preventing from suggesting edits at all.
    – gparyani
    Oct 2, 2014 at 15:26
7

I managed, along with Shub, to critically maim the 81 questions containing the which led to a successful trigger on the tag deletion script as evidenced by there being no tag wiki excerpt.

As mentioned in other answers the process of reading the question, deleting the tag and applying new tags if necessary is quite draining and it is quite an involved process to keep going back and forth between questions and the tag queue.

While I completely agree that needed to die, it raised the question in my mind of whether we need to replace it with a set of more specific hardware damage based tags in order for users to be able to be specific about what is actually going wrong.

I'll need to think more, and will edit when I'm not on my mobile but any comments are welcome.

1
  • Ah, that's nice: we just need to bring the number of tag uses down far enough so that a deletion script triggers? Sounds like vaccination: you don't need to vaccinate all people to get rid of the disease.
    – Jan Doggen
    Oct 28, 2014 at 15:28
4

I almost got rid of , but a couple of OPs reverted the edits. Right now the questions are on hold, but the tag is still live.

The review queue filled up Saturday afternoon and the system wouldn't take new edits for a little while.

I ran across a couple of bugs:

  • When editing Can't upload files or attachments, the tag disappears. I saw that with a couple of questions.

  • The system would occasionally reject a tag-only edit, claiming edits to the question text had to be a minimum size. Except that I hadn't edited the question text. This mostly seemed to affect questions flagged [duplicate].

It was surprisingly difficult. Not just removing the bad tag on a bunch of questions but reading each one, finding better tags, and looking for other edits is mentally draining. I think I made a little over 100 edits each day, and it turned out to be quite a slog.

2
  • Re-removed these with a comment. I'll seriously consider just deleting them if they come back. And yeah, that's why I figured tag-teaming in the chatroom was a good idea.
    – Journeyman Geek Mod
    Sep 29, 2014 at 11:57
  • 1
    That second bullet point seems to be the case when there are changes made to the Markdown parser that cause exactly the same Markdown to produce a slightly different HTML rendering (remember, the Markdown is parsed only at the time of posting, and the rendered HTML is saved after that). The system sees this difference and thinks that you changed something in the body, and it rejects it.
    – gparyani
    Sep 29, 2014 at 14:17
2

I helped get rid of the and tags. Those tags are still empty as of today.

I might also have evicted another tag or two on a small number of posts, but that's what the better part of my ~80 edits amounted to. (I was somewhat late to the party, and it was late in the evening local time when I showed up so I didn't stay for very long.)

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