After suggesting numerous tag cleanups on Meta, I'm wondering if some of these might actually be a bad idea.

Cleaning up the database tag was one of my suggestions. It had almost 500 questions at the time, and the majority of the usage was as a redundant meta tag with another application-specific tag. There wasn't much voting on the question so I took a stab at a first pass cleanup of just those kinds of duplicates.

By the time I got the question count under 400, I had a eureka. Why do this?

1. It doesn't help
Changing the tags on old questions will make no significant difference in anyone's ability to find those questions. It also won't eliminate the need for the tag. There is some non-meta usage of the tag, like interoperability, problems across multiple applications, and database-nature problems seeking a solution that might involve various possible applications. So there is no apparent benefit to performing tag cleanup on hundreds of old questions.

2. It causes harm
Dumping tons of questions into the active questions list just because their tags were changed doesn't serve much useful purpose, but it buries questions that are new or have been answered or edited in an important way.

It also wastes people's time (besides the person doing the useless tag edits). I don't know how many times I've seen a question like an example today--somebody couldn't get their old printer to work with Linux. I took the time to find the link to the manufacturer's driver download and posted an answer. Then I noticed that it was an old question that has long since been overtaken by events. It was an obsolete printer so no one else is likely to benefit from the answer, either. The question was in the active questions list because somebody did tag cleanup on the manufacturer tag. This kind of thing happens all the time with tag cleanups and the Community stirring of the old questions pot (the majority of the random selections being ones that don't need or benefit from further attention).

Recommendations

• Don't cleanup tags on old questions unless it is a relatively small number of questions and doing so will allow elimination of a bad tag.

• Add definitions to such tags. Most of the ambiguous tags are ambiguous because they are undefined.

• Deprecate the bad tags that can't be readily deleted. They can remain on old questions without the need to replace them with a better tag, but can't be used for new questions.

• Create a separate list for tag-only changes. They can be available for review if needed, but not overwhelm the active questions list.