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We have the tag. Its usage guidance says:

When something flickers it flashes repeatedly. Flickering in the Ask Ubuntu forums is generally referring to screen issues, or to describe an LED, such as,"The hard disk access light flickered."

Having a single tag for both screen flickering and other kinds of flickering is rather confusing.

Since the vast majority of the questions regarding this tag in Ask Ubuntu is about screen flickering, should the tag be renamed to or (and its usage guidance edited accordingly)? Or as muru has suggested in the comments should it be made a synonym of ?

Thanks Zanna for pointing up to the issue.

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    I don't see why should it have a tag at all. Who is an expert on screen flickering? Why would anyone follow a tag for screen flickering long term?
    – muru
    Commented Apr 22, 2021 at 9:32
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    @muru While I agree that it isn't a tag that someone would follow, it could be useful when someone searches for questions about screen flickering issues by tag.
    – BeastOfCaerbannog
    Commented Apr 22, 2021 at 9:41
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    But why would you need a tag for searching either? It's not like "screen flickering" as a search term is going to be very noisy
    – muru
    Commented Apr 22, 2021 at 9:52
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    Also for searching to be effective, someone has to be maintaining that tag and making sure it's applied right. If no one follows it, it will become unmaintained and useless in searching over a simple word search.
    – muru
    Commented Apr 22, 2021 at 9:54
  • @muru It depends on the user persona, who is using the site. A beginner, unable to diagnose their problem might not even know that drivers exist in a machine. They will see only until their screen, because that's in front of them. So they will come to the site and say, "My screen is flickering". Then, the power-user persona type, who knows about drivers and can help them (say, even specializes in drivers), can find these people by following the "(screen-)flicker" tag (along with the "drivers" tag too of course (to find the other well-informed people with these problems as well)).
    – Levente
    Commented Apr 24, 2021 at 13:50
  • In other words, knowing to use the "drivers" tag assumes a level of well-informedness. But not all site users are initially on that level.
    – Levente
    Commented Apr 24, 2021 at 13:51
  • @Levente yes, so read what I said again: unless someone follows the tag and makes sure it's correctly applied, it's useless. Are you going to do that?
    – muru
    Commented Apr 24, 2021 at 14:08
  • @muru I appear to have answered your two "why" questions. As to whether I will do the maintenance: no, I won't.
    – Levente
    Commented Apr 24, 2021 at 14:09
  • @Levente then it's useless for beginners and power users alike.
    – muru
    Commented Apr 24, 2021 at 14:10
  • And even if there were some users who wanted to help out on screen issues, I'd imagine they won't be just interested in screen flickering, but display issues in general and follow display, and I'd expect beginners to use that tag too.
    – muru
    Commented Apr 24, 2021 at 14:14
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    @muru "@Levente yes, so read what I said again: unless someone follows the tag and makes sure it's correctly applied, it's useless. Are you going to do that?" That logic can be applied to all tags. However, not every tag has to be (has been) assigned to a single person to be responsible for it. The correct application of tags is both the OP's and the community's work.
    – BeastOfCaerbannog
    Commented Apr 24, 2021 at 18:32
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    @muru "... I'd imagine they won't be just interested in screen flickering, but display issues in general and follow display, and I'd expect beginners to use that tag too." If someone has experienced screen flickering issues and has managed to solve them, they could well be interested in following this tag. Also, the same could be said about the tearing tag. Should it also be removed and keep all screen issues under the display tag?
    – BeastOfCaerbannog
    Commented Apr 24, 2021 at 18:35
  • If such a person did manage to solve an issue, I'd bet they managed to learn something about their particular graphics card and associated driver (if any), and not about screen tearing or flickering in general. In fact, looking at tearing and seeing how many of them aren't tagged with the appropriate graphics-card tags, I'd say tearing (153 questions in 11 years) and flicker (195 questions in 11 years, and up for renaming to boot) should either be synonymised to visual-artifacts (129 questions in nearly 8 years), or all three should just be synonymised to display.
    – muru
    Commented Apr 25, 2021 at 2:00
  • "The correct application of tags is both the OP's and the community's work" And it's patently obvious that unless you make that easy, neither the OP nor the community is going to do it. When a tag is too narrow, then the "community" in general is unlikely to be aware of it, so unlikely to add it to applicable questions that don't have it, and without followers, there won't be users who will bother removing it when misapplied to questions. IMO these tags are too narrow in scope.
    – muru
    Commented Apr 25, 2021 at 2:10
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    @muru I like the idea of synonimizing all to visual-artifacts!
    – BeastOfCaerbannog
    Commented Apr 25, 2021 at 5:13

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