Should tags reflect only the OP's question or the solution to the problem as well?

Question

On Where should I travel to see this building? there was a discussion about tags.

Originally the question was tagged with architecture, identify-this and eastern-europe. An answer was the correct answer, and it became obvious that the building mentioned in the question is located in Bucharest, Romania. So the tags bucharest and romania where added, which led to a discussion whether tags should only represent the question, or also the insights gained by the answer.

What is the opinion of the Community?

Answer 1

There has been some discussion on this on Meta StackOverflow, mostly in the context of how tags are used on StackOverflow but I think the same applies to us too.

There was a proposal to add a tagging system for answers for precisely this situation but it was declined.

The general consensus on MSO seems to be that tags should describe a question regardless of what the answer is. See the discussions on these threads:

• Should we retag questions with topics proposed in the answers?
• Add tag(s) to accepted answers
• Proper use of tags; to enhance or only to describe question

I agree with this consensus. While it's true that retagging a question may make it more 'discoverable', I think for those situations the search function fulfills the purpose of discover-ability rather than tags.

Answer 2

I'd say it's rarely appropriate, but not never. Tags are there to help people find information, but they're limited. If a question yields three answers, adding a tag (or two!) for each answer is going to push us over the limit, so hopefully that's clear as not being appropriate. For three answers, one accepted, adding the tags for the accepted one but not the others risks making it seem even stronger an answer, which may not be fair as it wasn't there to start with. If all three answers refer to the same thing, then it would often seem to be a case where the answer related tag would help people find things later, without confusing. Tagging is there to help, especially for people browsing or searching, so in that case adding a tag relating to all the answers would seem to help, so maybe it is appropriate.

Perhaps another way to think of it is with comments on the question. Someone asks a question, comments are added to clarify something, the OP answers and makes the question clearer, it then feels reasonable to me to edit the tags and add something in that's clear from that. If several people were to instead answer rather than commenting, and clarify it that way, adding the tags then feels very similar to me, so would seem OK. In summary, I'd say it's something that's rarely appropriate, but not never!

Answer 3

In addition to what Ankur said:

• Some people look at the tags to decide whether to answer a question or not -- if it's tagged with a thing they don't care about, they might not even read it.
• Such retagging interferes with new answers to the question -- contributors might (incorrectly) assume that the narrowed scope was set by the author, while a third party actually did that.
• Setting the scope of the question is responsibility of the author. Retagging and edits by other members of the community should support that, not interfere with it.

Admittedly, none of those reasons are compelling enough for our circumstances, but I see no reason to deviate from what seems to be an accepted SE policy.

Answer 4

I generally agree with the fact that tags reflect the question, not the answer. On the other hand, in the case of identify-this, there is obviously only one correct answer, and the appropriate tags are valid for the question as well. So I think that this particular case could use an exception and such questions could be re-tagged.

Of couse, this is not the case of e.g. where-on-earth, where the question can likely have a wider scope than one place.