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There are now over 100 meta-questions.

It might be useful if they were consistently tagged.

Left to my own devices there are some tags I might edit, to help me make sense of them:

  • Delete almost every 'unique' tag i.e. tags which are only used once, to tag one topic: because IMO tags are to mark groups of related topics, so a tag is only useful if it's applicable to more than one topic
  • Delete the tag: it says nothing, because isn't every topic about quality?
  • Merge the 'question' tags: currently we have , , and ... perhaps they should all be or
  • Make an effort to tag topics as being either to do with questions or to do with answers: e.g. I guess that this topic is more about answers than about questions.
  • Read through all topics and add tags where necessary; many are probably just and ought to be tagged as 'question', 'answer', or something else as well.

My ambition is to make it easier to discover everything that's been written on meta about a given topic, including for example, to start with:

  • Every topic related to asking questions
  • Every topic related to answering questions

So my questions:

  • Any comments on the specific tag-related/retagging proposals above?
  • Does anyone else want to do this kind of job (eventually editing tags of many/most meta questions)
  • If not can I start to do that 'at will'? Should I ask for permission/discussion of specific tag-edits (e.g. as listed above) before I do it? Or should I go ahead and do/start it without asking (because may be quicker to do it than to ask, and changes like the above are likely to be an improvement)?
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  • Will mods have a chance to review and approve your edits, as we do with main site edits?
    – Andriy Volkov Mod
    Oct 5, 2014 at 1:20
  • @AndreiVolkov With 1000+ reputation my edits are now applied immediately. And, creating a sock-puppet account to make edits using less than 1000 reputation wouldn't work: because my earlier experience was that my ability to edit on the main site was subject to approval, but my ability to edit on meta was not enabled at all.
    – ChrisW Mod
    Oct 5, 2014 at 1:31
  • @AndreiVolkov I edited the tag wiki (i.e. description) of various tags, mostly by copy-and-pasting the descriptions from meta.stackexchange.com/tags ... and, I made three new tags i.e. spelling, traditions, beta ... those tag wiki edits are queued to be reviewed.
    – ChrisW Mod
    Oct 10, 2014 at 22:35
  • Looks good! What are all those unused tags, like meditation where did they come from?
    – Andriy Volkov Mod
    Oct 10, 2014 at 23:10
  • @AndreiVolkov Tags like 'meditation' are tags which had been applied to one or two questions: which I removed from the question (see "Delete almost every 'unique' tag" above). 'meditation' is a suitable tag, not a suitable meta-tag: for questions on the main site not the meta-site. Such'zombie' tags can now be deleted automatically. Other tags like 'users' were created when the meta-site was created but not used.
    – ChrisW Mod
    Oct 10, 2014 at 23:19
  • Thanks, thought so. Do you know if they will be garbage-collected automatically, or do we need to delete them?
    – Andriy Volkov Mod
    Oct 10, 2014 at 23:33
  • @AndreiVolkov According to meta.stackexchange.com/a/240652/139866 the custom (site-specific) ones will be collected daily; the default ones will exist forever (unless, perhaps, "you were to briefly use them (add them to a post), then remove them again"). Re. the default ones, the "Make a Meta" process copied the most popular meta-tags from the main meta-site, but didn't copy the tag's descriptions nor synonyms. I suggest you delete the 'questions' tag since there are more specific tags (e.g. 'allowed-questions') to use instead.
    – ChrisW Mod
    Oct 10, 2014 at 23:39
  • I can't delete, but I can merge -- does that sound right?
    – Andriy Volkov Mod
    Oct 10, 2014 at 23:52
  • @AndreiVolkov I don't know what to merge 'questions' with? My complaint about it is that it's too general. We have an 'answers' tag for all answer-related topics, but more-specific tags e.g. 'allowed-questions' for question-related topics. So now I'll try see whether 'questions' will auto-delete within a day, if I use it briefly (using it to tag this topic) and then disuse it (remove it from this topic).
    – ChrisW Mod
    Oct 11, 2014 at 0:02

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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We can't let your enthusiasm go to waste! I'm inclined to say, go ahead and do the above. Deep bows and thank you.

Should I ask for permission/discussion of specific tag-edits (e.g. as listed above) before I do it?

While I don't have concerns about you getting carried away, being too methodical, following a single organizational principle too far etc., let's not go all or nothing with permissions. If you feel an edit could be questioned, go ahead and ask, otherwise just do it.

Just my personal opinion, I'm not a boss here.

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