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We seem to be getting some duplicate tags cropping up, I think because we don't have a standard on plurals and tag names.

For example, we have:

Is there a standard policy across other SE sites that we should be following for this?

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There's no "standard" SE policy as such.

The general trend has been to:

  • choose plurals over singulars
  • make the singular a synonym of the plural

but there are plenty of exceptions.

For the tags you point out, it appears someone's already merged each pair to the singular version, deleting the plural. If the plurals return, this should (imo) be revisited.

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    Glad someone's fixed it for these! And hopefully one of us will have enough rep soon to be able to create the synonyms as needed...
    – Gagravarr
    Jun 26, 2011 at 13:12
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Most of the time tag auto-completion prevents this.

The rest of the time sites end up making them tag synonyms with whichever is more popular being the main one, generally the plural for countable nouns and the singular for mass nouns.

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  • @Dori: That's why I said "most of the time" auto-completion prevents this. People usually only create the other form if the auto-completion didn't work, if they didn't understand the auto-completion, or if they just go ahead and ignore the auto-completion to consciously create a very similar tag.
    – hippietrail
    Jun 26, 2011 at 6:06

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