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By far our most popular tag is with over double the number of questions than the second most popular tag. It seems a shame to me that such a rich topic is lumped under one tag. I'd like to suggest a bit of light retagging to introduce some sub categories. Suggested categories could be

And so on

I would like to keep as the broad category and add the others in as subcategories. I like the idea of the tags been in the format because people will type in meditation as a tag and see the other categories and it may encourage then to refine their tagging.

Is this a good idea? Does anyone have any other categories? I'm happy to gradually work through and retag and write the tag wikis

EDIT

So after discussion the proposal is

  1. Create a set of tags as subcategories for meditation in the format

  2. stays but becomes a tag for questions about meditation that are general or difficult to categorise

  3. Retag existing questions so that have or but not both

  4. Existing tags such are become and synonyms are used to repoint and/or questions are retagged

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  • Defining subcategories sounds clever. Have you seen that done on any other sites?
    – ChrisW Mod
    Commented May 20, 2015 at 17:15
  • @ChrisW its just based on how stack overflow does software versions. So TFS is a tag ( team foundation server) but there are also tags for tfs-2012 tfs-2008 and so on.
    – Crab Bucket Mod
    Commented May 20, 2015 at 18:36
  • That seems like a good idea. Would you be retagging items currently tagged as "anapanasati", "samatha", "metta bhavana" , etc?
    – Robin111
    Commented May 20, 2015 at 19:38
  • Also, even if you use Meditation as the 2nd word in a tag, it will still appear in a search. But the way you have it above looks good too.
    – Robin111
    Commented May 20, 2015 at 19:39
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    @Robin111 I'd retag anapanasati and "samatha or maybe put then as synonyms if that seems appropriate. There;s others such as zazen and posture that I would also put in as synonyms too so we'd have zazen pointing to meditation-zazen if that makes sense
    – Crab Bucket Mod
    Commented May 20, 2015 at 20:30
  • This seems well thought out. :-)
    – Robin111
    Commented May 22, 2015 at 20:52
  • Only 15 meditation topics left. Have you finished now (do you want to keep these as-is), or nearly finished (15 more to edit)?
    – ChrisW Mod
    Commented Jun 13, 2015 at 17:17
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    @ChrisW I'm nearly finished. I'm thinking of leaving them as is and then it's just thetag wikis to write. If it categories them an further the tags become silly. I had a meditation-history tag which I've taken off again as it added nothing IMHO
    – Crab Bucket Mod
    Commented Jun 13, 2015 at 17:25
  • @ChrisW actually I've changed my mind. I've retagged everything so there is nothing left under meditation. I think it works. Just the tag wikis to go
    – Crab Bucket Mod
    Commented Jun 14, 2015 at 17:08

2 Answers 2

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its just based on how stack overflow does software versions. So TFS is a tag ( team foundation server) but there are also tags for tfs-2012 tfs-2008 and so on

I think that's a good idea, and is perhaps how tags are meant to be used.

On Stack Overflow, for example, if I enter [tfs*] in the search box, then that automatically expands to [tfs] or [tfs2010] or [tfs2012] or [tfsbuild] or [tfs2013] or [tfs2008] or [tfs-sdk] or [tfs-workitem] or [tfs-power-tools] or [tfs-migration] or [tfs-process-template] or [tfs-web-access] or [tfsintegrationplatform] or [tfs-alerts] or [tfs2005] or [tfs-reports] or [tfs-express] or [tfs11] or [tfs-security] or [tfs-to-tfs-migration-tool].

And, the 'interesting' and 'ignored' tags support wildcards (as of 2009).

We could use two tags for each question e.g. meditation plus meditation-insight, however I might disagree and suggest it's better (for tidiness sake) to minimize the number of non-specific meditation questions, and edit the tag to replace it with a more specific suffixed tag if possible.

Have you looked through the questions: can you think of an appropriate suffix for every one of them?

Does it make sense to say that any meditation, and any question about meditation, is necessarily of a specific type and therefore has an appropriate suffix?

Note that there is a generic or non-specific tfs tag as well as the more specific ones.

Also, when tagging a question typing in prac will bring up personal-practice as a suggested tag. IMO meditation-metta is a better tag than metta-meditation because the former supports wildcards and makes the subcategorization obvious.

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  • 1st point. My instinct is for meditation-xxxx rather then xxx-meditation as it does make it obvious that there are sub categories - Robin prefers the other way which I understand. 2nd point. I thought all meditation questions would have the top level meditation tag but I don't feel strongly about it. 3rd point I haven't been through the questions - just looked at a few. I hoped that ideas for additional meditation tags might come out of this question or we would gradually add more as the need became obvious.
    – Crab Bucket Mod
    Commented May 21, 2015 at 20:10
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    "Does it make sense to say that any meditation, and any question about meditation, is necessarily of a specific type and therefore has an appropriate suffix?" - No; surely some questions will be generic and surely some questions will come from beginners who aren't familiar with the specific types at all. (Also, I have no preference. I was just tossing out an idea as a potential compromise. I do think it's good to order the Meditation posts in some way. What's manageable with 1,400 questions will be less so at 14,000 questions so getting a system sooner than later would be proactive.)
    – Robin111
    Commented May 21, 2015 at 23:05
  • @CrabBucket Given Robin's latest comment my vote is for: create new tags with a suffix for popular/common types of meditation topic; rename some existing tags to use the new suffixed tags; keep unsuffixed meditation only for otherwise-unclassified topics (so a topic might be tagged with meditation or with meditation-metta but not both).
    – ChrisW Mod
    Commented May 21, 2015 at 23:14
  • @ChrisW sound reasonable. I've edited question with that in mind
    – Crab Bucket Mod
    Commented May 22, 2015 at 20:46
  • @Robin111 I've amended the proposal - does that seem fair?
    – Crab Bucket Mod
    Commented May 22, 2015 at 20:46
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Why not just use multiple tags, like ? It seems awkward to me to put the type after the subject in the tag.

I would think that we should just do a tag edit to specify type if they were missing.

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  • My thinking around this is that tags in this way will come up when anyone types in meditation hence it will be obvious to question posters that there is a lot of different aspects to meditation and will encourage them to tag as such and may improve question quality. Also it will be obvious to beginner users that these terms are related to meditation - vipassana, zazen etc.. are technical terms (IMHO) so why not give new users extra help in understanding these terms. But this is just an idea to I'm happy not to do it. Just seeing what people think
    – Crab Bucket Mod
    Commented May 21, 2015 at 9:14
  • If it sounds better to say "metta-meditation","vipassana-meditation" all tags that have the word meditation in them (even if it's not first) will still come up when someone types in meditation to tag. Perhaps less awkward but still useful to newer folks who are unfamiliar with the many specific types of meditation?
    – Robin111
    Commented May 21, 2015 at 11:24
  • @CrabBucket What if someone just wants a list of all meditation posts? Why isn't that a valid category on its own? Is it really too broad?
    – yuttadhammo Mod
    Commented May 21, 2015 at 11:26
  • I believe these were suggested as subcategories to the main category of "Meditation". Might be especially useful as time goes on and the number of meditation posts become unwieldy without breaking them out somewhat.
    – Robin111
    Commented May 21, 2015 at 11:41
  • @yuttadhammo robin's right. We would keep meditation so we could get the full list and use sub categories to break them down further
    – Crab Bucket Mod
    Commented May 21, 2015 at 11:44
  • Then why add meditation- to the front? It seems unnecessary.
    – yuttadhammo Mod
    Commented May 21, 2015 at 11:44
  • @Robin111 very happy with that vipassana-meditation, zazen-meditation looks better. We could have meditation-posture still as that reads better
    – Crab Bucket Mod
    Commented May 21, 2015 at 11:45
  • @yuttadhammo so that when people type meditation in when tagging question they see the sub categories automatically
    – Crab Bucket Mod
    Commented May 21, 2015 at 11:47
  • It seems overkill to me...
    – yuttadhammo Mod
    Commented May 21, 2015 at 11:47
  • I someone wanted a list of all meditation posts then they could search for [meditation*]. Having the suffixes means that when people browse the list of tags (or begin to add a meditation tag to their new topic) then they can see that there several types of meditation tag.
    – ChrisW Mod
    Commented May 22, 2015 at 1:33

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