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When tagging or re-tagging a question on a device's MAC-address we do find but the tag wiki there says:

The Macintosh line of computers. Use this tag for questions regarding installing or using Ubuntu on Mac hardware. For questions about the hardware MAC address use .

Only there is no tag . Was this tag removed for any reasons? Should it be recreated?

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    mac-address is a terrible tag, we don't need it. Dec 13, 2013 at 15:29

2 Answers 2

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Changed the tag excerpt to networking. Seems that whatever you do with a mac address has to do with networking.

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  • Huge FYI here, Braiam, you cannot use the [tag: code in the excerpts. It is strictly text-only. I revised the excerpt (pending approval) to account for this.
    – Thomas Ward Mod
    Dec 14, 2013 at 19:33
  • @ThomasW. the same as in chat "/me blames @Seth"
    – Braiam
    Dec 14, 2013 at 19:52
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Are you an expert of mac-address? Let me put it in the ways I talked in another meta question about creating some tag:


Do others think we need this tag?

For that questions I normally ask myself "Myself, what is ?" and myself answers with a wikipedia dump:

A media access control address (MAC address) is a unique identifier assigned to network interfaces for communications on the physical network segment. MAC addresses are used as a network address for most IEEE 802 network technologies, including Ethernet. Logically, MAC addresses are used in the media access control protocol sublayer of the OSI reference model.

Then, I look another posts/tags that already has what mac-address means: "ethernet", "wireless", "network interfaces", "networking" other related terms/tags. Now, is the proportion of related terms big enough that it will make it difficult for answerers find the questions they want to answer? No? Then we do not need a tag.

Remember that tags aren't there for the users asking questions but for the users to find questions they want/could answer ;). I do not think we have an important proportion of users that would like to answer those kinds of questions, so NO, we do not need that tag.


So, the tag wiki needs to be modified (again) and tell us about networking which already cover any aspect of the mac-address tag. Silly tags, are unuseful tags. I'm not against the tag creation, I'm against the creation of a tag just because.

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  • On Unix & Linux they synonymized mac to macintosh, which I believe is better than having an ambiguous mac tag (which sadly is still also being used for the network MAC here). Having a tag mac-address would probably help people to not use the mac tag. Also I feel that having tags are valuable not only for us answerers but also for search queries including Google. The finer we can tune queries by using accurate tags the better they will be found. Accuracy comes with variety not with generality.
    – Takkat
    Dec 13, 2013 at 12:44
  • @Takkat but you are missing the important point: we have users in the capability to answer mac-address questions that are not already following the preexisting tags? Remember that tags are not for the one making the question but for the one answering.
    – Braiam
    Dec 13, 2013 at 13:07
  • @Takkat I'm not against the tag creation, I'm against the creation of a tag just because. Unless you show me that the tag will be in any way useful and won't be misused I'm going to voice my concerns and act according.
    – Braiam
    Dec 13, 2013 at 14:33
  • That's exactly why I did not create it in the first place ;)
    – Takkat
    Dec 13, 2013 at 14:48

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