One unique aspect of this site is/will be its tags—it already has more than some beta sites, and will end up (I suspect) having a simply huge number.
A site with a lot of tags is not a bad thing!
Tags that have been allowed to run wild, though, become nearly useless. The goal of this post is to be a place where the community can discuss various tag-related issues/options, and work together to keep its tags useful.
Questions? Concerns? Ideas? Suggestions? Add them here.
I think we should really work on unique descriptions for our tags, especially for the geographic.
For example, spain has this description:
Travel relating to Spain
I think this is really bad to have such descriptions. Our user is not an idiot - he needs some additional info. Say, about sangria, Pyrenees, corrida and football, or something.
Yes I realize some people will view them as being different. But there are also plenty of people who will call a chateau a castle anyway and we've merged or suggested to merge other things which differ to greater degrees.
We could merge them under a tag such as castles-and-chateaux but then what about palaces? Maybe castles-etc would be better and the tagwiki would explain what it covers and what it doesn't.
architecture? buildings-to-visit?
Commented
Jul 7, 2011 at 17:29
I just made a new tag sea-travel as a cover tag for questions when travelling on water is important but the mode of travel is not. It would also work for travelling between Panama and Colombia for instance where there are no ferries or cruises.
Earlier I created freighter-travel which is a specialist niche that mostly adventure travellers with plenty of money use.
We already had ferry and cruise which are both pretty obvious and I don't think should be merged with any of the other seafaring tags. Cruises are very exotic in Australia compared to Europe and North America. They exist but I've never met anybody who's been on one.
So this tag issue is "don't merge any of these tags" but do feel free to discuss how they overlap etc.
Merge sightseeing and must-see?
The latter had been used only once until this morning when I added it to another question that used that wording since I knew the tag already existed.
I think "must see" while more specific is also more subjective so maybe those two qualities balance each other out.
In any case the latter is a subset of the former which is much more used.
Should campervans and mobile homes / RV's be included in camping?
In Australia we don't really have the RV's of the extremely large size as in the US so we don't have dedicated RV parks as far as I know. In Canada and the US they do have them.
In Australia and Europe we have campervans and mobile homes which in my experience use the same campgrounds used for tents and caravans (called trailers in the US).
So I'm not sure whether to include RV's in camping but I would think not.
Then as to whether to include mobile homes and campervans is trickier because they have things more in common with camping, especially with caravans in some countries, but in north America it seems more natural to associate them with RV's.
So far I don't think we have any questions about RV's, mobile homes, or campervans so in the camping tag I've played it safe and only included tents and caravans /trailers.
Any ideas on what kind of grouping we should use or should we keep it this way until we get more questions?
There was a question with the tag infant and we had another question asking about travelling with toddlers but with no specific tag.
Travel guides usually have a section titles along the lines of "travel with kids" so it is a typical topic.
I made a new tag children which I added to both articles and removed the infant tag.
My thinking was that we will have questions about children of various ages but still a relatively small number compares to other questions so in this case a broad tag covering children from infancy up to the age they can travel independently would be better than having multiple age-group kind of tags. More specific words like "toddler" or "infant" can go in the question title and body with the one broad tag.
Do others think I made the right call?
I was silly and created both the resources and reference tags in the last couple of hours or less. I know they are synonyms on at least one other SE I use so they were probably bound to come up sooner or later anyway.
Anyway I think they should be merged. I don't know if "reference" should be "references" since it works as both a countable and mass noun. I would assume the existing internet-resources tag should also be moved in unless people feel a strong need to separate print and net resources for some reason.
I added the airport-security tag to this question. Was I right or do we need air-security?
Is culture a useful tag? I see it, at best, as not adding any value, and at worst, a problematic tag that will not have a satisfactory definition. There are huge academic debates about what the proper definition of "culture" is, and it's also just so broad a term that I don't think it's really helpful to include.
I bring up this issue because I was going to start going through and proposing tag wiki excerpts for some of the blank tags, and as I started to write out a description for culture I realized that I don't think it's a necessary tag.
The current questions for that tag benefit much more from their other tags than the culture one. My tag wiki excerpt started off with "The customs, behavior, language, attitudes, art and social institutions of a group" - but we already have local-customs language as well as tags for specific cultures like aboriginal maori etc.
It seems to me that most questions that have been asked and possibly will be asked are covered by other tags, especially local-customs language and food-and-drink.
Does anyone else have thoughts on removing this tag?
Could someone make brasil a synonym of brazil?
This is as obvious as it gets, but because I don't have any rep in the Brazil tag, personally I cannot even vote for the synonym to be created.
(On a site like ours, the Stack Exchange tag synonym system is far from optimal. It would be helpful if e.g. trusted users could do more, even just something like voting for any tag synonym.)
Also, on meta, could someone finally make tags and tagging synonyms? (Yes, this issue is as minor and as meta as it gets...)
Should attractions be merged into sightseeing? I'm in two minds but one thing to think about is that must-see has already been made a synonym of sightseeing but that phrase applies equally well to attractions.
automobiles should be a synonym of cars (which would need to be created).
"Automobile" is only used in USA as far as I know and is quite a quirky sounding word. "Car" on the other hand is used in all English speaking countries as far as I know, including the US.
Right now, the only rail transport related tag is 'high speed rail'? Should it a new tag, say, 'rail travel' (like the existing 'air travel' tag) be created instead, and 'high speed rail' and 'train' be made synonyms of this?
I accidentally created milesmore. This badge should be deleted or at least renamed to miles-and-more and then a synonym should related to loyality-programs.
Shouldn't money be the "lead tag" rather than currency? They are currently merged with the latter as the "lead tag" and "money" as a synonym.
But at least to my "currency" pretty much means the actual cash money of a particular country and many of the questions so tagged are talking much more generally including credit cards, debit cards, ATMs, etc. I think money is the more general term which would better suit such general types of questions.
money is the main tag now. Delete this post maybe?
fukushima should refer either to the prefecture or the capital (or just be a disambiguation page), and should not refer to the nuclear incident.
It's easier to add disambiguation to a nuclear incident than to a state/prefecture (though sometimes it can't be helped, such as Georgia).
Also, merely referring to an incident by its location can stigmatize a place. I understand that it's convenient in everyday conversation, but it shouldn't be used everywhere.
On meta, tag and tagging seem similar. Can someone include in the tag wiki how to distinguish them?
Likewise, what's the difference between extreme-tourism and adventure?
There are currently some questions tagged with islam which are about discrimination against Muslims, which don't require any knowledge about the religion Islam itself. I think they should not be tagged with "islam", because it isn't really about Islam, and instead should only be tagged with discrimination.
Examples:
Upvote or retag if you agree.
Should things suspected of being a scam by the OP, but turn out not to be, be tagged scam? Example question, currently not tagged: International driver's licence (IDD): is this site reliable?
A tag for each contry is a must. We cannot do anything about them, but I think istead of having too many tags, we should have tag combinations.
We have (india), (indian-citizens) similarly we have (italy)(italian-citizens), similarlly for all countries, instead of all the (*-citizens) tags, we can have a single (-citizens) tag. And all the users will be required to tag their questions with both (india) and (-citizens) (lets say).