Are computer brand tags necessary?

Question

Within the past few hours (of writing) have had two tag synonym requests to clean up branding tags and to unify them under some centralized tags.

However, this brings up the following question:

Are computer brand tags (like asus) even necessary for the site?

Tags are meant to define what a question is about, not what's contained within the question, therefore they seem to be somewhat irrelevant as all computers are pretty similar.

Should we just burn all of these brand tags and prevent them from being used? Or do they actually serve a purpose on this site?

Answer 1

Yes they have a use. You can find quite a few questions about brand specific issues.

Think along the lines of a Dell Laptop and an ASUS Laptop and WiFi is not working on both.

In this case a distinction by the tags, which is very easy to spot, would show us that these are not the same WiFi issue, due to different hardware. Another example would be for people who work at companies to spot the questions and for users to see where hardware problems could be, when buying a new computer.

In short, there are many reasons to have them, even if they are not the most useful tags we have.

Also, as @Zacharee1 pointed out in comments

You also might want to specify what you mean by brand tag. For instance, nvidia, amd, intel, wacom, etc are all brand tags that are pretty important.

Answer 2

Not by themselves as company and manufacturer brands, but as a product/feature/object/... etc nvidia. I think a better question: How can we improve the resolution times, improve the quality content and decrease duplicates in Askubuntu?

Remove unspecific tags

Proposals

1. Have inclusions in tags etc asus-pc, asus-laptop, ... Having tag A-B is not the same thing as A + B. For example, compare

   • asus-laptop + power + apple-mouse VS asus + power + laptop + nvidia + apple, where you cannot even express yourself in the latter. Limiting inclusions makes it difficult to study those inclusions.
   • Currently, there are much duplicates, low-quality content, unanswered threads and copy-pasted answer (plagiarism) under tags asus, apple, ... in Askubuntu. To go them through systematically, we need inclusions, which helps to find the duplicates, improve the content and think/work for the answer.
   • Later, remove some inclusions if the bug/issue is shown to be irrelevant to the specific inclusion.

2. Avoid Manufacturer and Company tags but allow inclusions and allow the former if they are applicable etc nvidia, ...

Related:

• Manufacturer & Company tags are back. Again
• Do we need “brand/manufacturer” tags?

Answer 3

I believe these tags are unnecessary for the most part.

There are very few actual cases where a brand tag is beneficial, such as mac where the hardware and the installation platform actually matters and may need specialized experience. And even so, this should really just be used for installation on Mac computers and problems specific to only Macs.

Otherwise, most questions won't benefit from brand tags, solely because it doesn't honestly matter for the question at hand.

Therefore, I propose that we discontinue the use of brand tags unless the problem at hand is something absolutely specific to that brand of machine.

For example, this question has absolutely no need for asus, as it's a general problem that has absolutely nothing to do with a quirk with Asus machines. Conversely, questions like this deserve the brand tag as it's specific to a quirk with that specific brand of device.