Tag Separation and Handling: The Asus tag and separating it out into subcategories instead (asus-pc, asus-laptop, etc.)

Question

Related:

• http://meta.askubuntu.com/questions/15996/tag-synonym-request-asus-related-stuff (in dispute)
• http://meta.askubuntu.com/questions/7733/do-we-need-brand-manufacturer-tags

This is a call for community discussion on the matter of manufacturer/brand specific tags with relation to Ask Ubuntu.

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History

It was brought up in chat and Meta requests to merge the asus-pc and asus-laptop tags to asus and set up tag synonyms. The justification was that we do not need additional Asus tags for tagging Asus-related questions.

Another user has made an argument that the asus-pc and asus-laptop tags are more useful than the Asus tag, and are quoting this question on Super User.

The editing of questions to add in asus-pc and asus-laptop have been getting negative attention in review queues. That is, reviews of suggested tag revisions such as these have been receiving rejections recently.

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It can be generally argued that there are cases where a generic manufactuer tag are bad. This applies for Logitech, for instance, in which they make mice, keyboards, webcams, and many other peripheral devices. This may also apply for cases such as Intel or AMD, in which they all create CPUs, GPUs, and other devices which need handled individually.

There are also cases where having individual product tags is poor compared to having an all-inclusive tag. Consider, if we made a tag for every single Dell computer model, we'd have a thousand tags that don't add anything. The same applies for Apple devices. That said, if a company only produces computers, it may not necessarily be a good idea to explicitly separate it into laptop, desktop, server, etc. subcategories.

To quote the "Do we need brand/manufacturer tags" question's answers from three years ago, a core question comes to mind with regards to these types of flags:

Who would filter using (the tag)? Who would think this is an expertise area?

With this question in mind, there is argument for either side of the discussion - whether it's keeping the tags merged which has been done today, or whether we start separating this tag out.

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The Question

This discussion thread here brings up a very specific question for the community to answer to decide how to proceed on this individual case:

With regards to the asus tag, should we leave them all lumped together under the manufacturer general tag, or should we split them up into individual subcategory-tags (such as asus-laptop, asus-pc, etc.)?

Answer 1

I don't believe we need OEM tags... considering the public of AU, the only ones that would use such tags are layman. And these tend to not be very effective tagging questions. I prefer to avoid OEM tags at all. Asus is found in the AU scope mostly (almost exclusively) because the asker uses it.

I've checked the most recent questions and found that in no case, the fact that OEM was Asus is relevant, in some questions the hardware is totally irrelevant. Asus can be almost always removed from the questions and add another more specific tag, ie. if the problem is your graphics, then intel/amd/nvidia are more relevant than asus, if your question is about wireless, realtek/atheros/intel are more relevant. Notice, that sometimes these cards get rebranded, but the chip behaves as the makers. The Linux kernel doesn't care about brand as much as chipset manufacturer. Here's the list of supported wireless chipsets, they are a handful and none is a famous OEM (Intel is the most broad in this aspect, since they make CPU, GPU, wireless, audio, etc.).

So, my point of view is don't separate or merge, just remove.

Answer 2

I've stated my opinion before, in one of the ASUS Meta questions, but I'm going to state it again, just in a more complex way, and with a bit of backtracking :p.

The tag asus says it's for every ASUS electronic device, and that's where there might be a problem, since ASUS doesn't only make computers. It also makes motherboards, tablets, phones and maybe other things not listed in its store. So maybe it's a bit of a generalization to group everything together.

However, ASUS phones and tablets don't tend to run Ubuntu. Some of the models probably have Touch ports, but then those should require their own tags (asus-tablet, asus-phone), as the hardware and necessary instructions are likely very different from their desktops.

Also, I doubt we're going to be getting questions specifically about ASUS motherboards, unless the computers are custom-built, in which case the motherboard is still probably not very important.

But here's another problem. There are quite a few product lines of ASUS laptops. This I did not realize when I was just looking up the ZenBook series. They have Chromebooks, gaming PCs, workstations, 2-in-1s, eeePCs, and a few others. Obviously, some of these, like the Chromebook, are special and need special instructions to run Ubuntu properly. There's also the Chromebox, which is a desktop.

Here's a new proposition. I say we don't look at this completely objectively and equally. We don't use the argument "we'd have to create one for every type"; we don't need to do that in this case.

Most of the product lines are pretty similar: ROG, X, Vivo, Zen, Multimedia, even Transformer -- these are all pretty similar in general terms. The desktops seem to be mostly similar, internally, as well (except the Chromebox).

Since most of the desktops and laptops aren't very different, would it make sense to create just one asus-computer tag (or something like that) and have it apply to all the normal models? Then, we could make asus-chrome (to include desktop and laptops -- I don't care if it is asus-chromebook and asus-chromebox instead) to include those special devices. If ASUS happens to make others, or I'm missing one, then we add that too.

So, hopefully I can say this concisely. What if we do this: instead of deciding on whether or not we should make a tag for every single model, why don't we do this intelligently (in the programming/coding sense)? Why don't we stop using the argument, "we can't make this tag because then we'd have to make all the others," and use, "we can't make this tag because it isn't special hardware"?

Let's think about each individual situation and decide. Let's make a tag for a specific model, but only if that specific model actually needs a tag (special hardware/situation). We need conditionals if we want tag-making to make sense.

_{I failed at the concise solution, but I hope I got my point across.}

Answer 3

OEM tags are important when it comes to laptops where ACPI is highly tailored by manufacturer.

As a compromise between tags of "Asus-Desktop", "Asus-Laptop", "Dell-Desktop", "Dell-Laptop", "Toshiba-Laptop", "Sony-Laptop", "HP-Desktop", "HP-Laptop", "HP-Tablet", etc. We could have tags for OEM Dell, Toshiba, Asus, HP, Sony, etc. and separate tags for platform Desktop, Laptop, Notebook, Zenbook, Tablet, Smartphone and maybe some day Fridge if Google figures out how to search your fridge and sell the data to grocery stores.

Separate tags will cut down on number of combination tags. ie number of OEM's plus 6 platforms instead of number of OEMS times 6 platforms.

Answer 4

As the original poster of the synonym request, I feel like my justification is needed in this regard.

After noticing (and rejecting) edits in the review queue that were changing asus to asus-laptop or asus-computer, I decided enough was enough and submitted the meta post mentioned in the original question.

It seems excessive to have three tags for the exact same thing. While tags such as asus-computer would be acceptable, there's no reason to then ALSO have tags like asus and asus-laptop.

Tags should be as easy to find as possible, and should be as short as necessary to convey the point. As long as there's no need to divide asus, we shouldn't. If the need comes, we can move posts over to a more appropriate tag (see Zacharee's post).

However, these tags should only be used when they're appropriate, which is a problem with this site. asus (and its derivatives) should not be used unless the question actually is Asus specific. If it can be applied to any other system, asus should not be applied to the post in question.

The reason I suggested the tag edit and the synonyms was to remedy the issue of the tagging discrepancy and unify everything under the single asus tag, as there was no need (in my mind looking at the questions) to actually have a split as of yet.

Answer 5

Just a small point. asus-pc and asus-laptop mean the same thing (PC == Personal Computer, a Laptop is this too), if we are going to debate this, should we not use asus-desktop rather than asus-pc?

That first point also demonstrates my concerns with splitting the asus tag, where does it end?

If we split asus in to laptop and desktop versions, what about servers or ultrabooks or tablets or phones or tablet / laptop hybrid, if we split it once, we would have to split it further down the line, when questions are asked that those, very specific, tags do not cover.

While I am not for just removing the brand tags, I can admit that from a question answering perspective, they are not the most useful tags to begin with and adding desktop tells us nothing more that the brand tag did, we still need to know the exact model of the desktop.

To summarize, keep it simple, asus as a tag has value for people looking for asus related issues, whether we add a desktop or a laptop, these people still need to check the question and splitting the tags only causes confusion for the new users viewing them in the long run.

We should also merge zenbook and any other modal specific tags in to asus.

Here we only are discussing asus but what about the other brands? We will have to separate them out too, it will be chaos.

Answer 6

I think we need better quality content in Asbuntu by having more iterative work process here where goals can be

• find faster duplicates,
• find faster plagiarism,
• identify issues/bugs faster,
• resolve issues/bugs faster,
• forward them to the upstream faster if applicable, ...

The product branches 1) laptops, 2) PCs, 3) ultrabooks, ... N) have different design architectures i.e. their own issues and bugs. Each manufacturer can have their characteristic bugs, about which many are still unidentified and unsolved. I think we need more iterative work process where you can express those issues with inclusions, since the issue may just be a complication caused by other internal issues

1. Identify problems
2. Use inclusions if you need them to be specific
3. Repeat ...
4. Remove/adjust the inclusion if necessary

This process can lead that the issue resolves and the inclusion becomes unnecessary/unspecific, when you can delete it. However, so long as we do not know where the bugs are precisely, we need to express the target as precisely as we can, therefore we need

1. clear titles,
2. clear bodies,
3. inclusions in tags

Measures

• remove unspecific tags; here why A-B is not the same as A+B
• differential conditions -field if you cannot precisely identify the condition/situation - to express the next most likely condition where the problem/issue can be
• ...