Why does it take 300 rep to create a new tag?

Question

I hope it's ok to provide my feedback for just now signing up and asking my first question in Ask Ubuntu. This post isn't my question but feedback. I'm really impressed how when you create a question, it lists similar questions based on your subject. That helps to avoid asking same/similar questions. I did search the community first. Also love the tags. This helps me drill down into related posts to find a nugget of useful info. However, one of my tags was rejected because I don't have enough points to create a tag. I guess that's ok but would be nice to add a tag if it doesn't exist. Maybe some other way to "vet" new tags.

My discussion topic is why does it take 300 points to create new tags on the site. I think the community could benefit from those with fewer points to create tags. For example, my question was on bastille. Bastille is not a tag, but probably should be one.

I posted this discussion topic here because according to the "What's Meta" help page, a discussion tag is used for:

discussion, for posts that may not have a clear-cut right or wrong answer and are often subjective. If it's not a bug or feature request, it is probably a discussion.

I can delete my post and post elsewhere if it is more appropriate.

Thanks again for such a great tool and community!

Answer 1

While you may feel that your tag was valid in this instance, that is rarely the case. Quite often, people who are new to the Stack Exchange way of doing things will attempt to use tags like keywords when blogging - which is not how they're intended to be used.

Tags are intended to be many things, least not useful and descriptive. The way we use tags on Stack Exchange is to filter groups of questions according to their primary subject, to allow the experts we have for each of these subjects to easily find questions they can answer.

The reputation requirement is there to ensure that the people creating tags have at least a minimum amount of activity on the site. If you're ever stuck in a position where you need a tag on a question but you're unable to create itself, you have a couple of options:

• Drop in to the Ask Ubuntu General Chatroom and ask for a higher reputation user to create it for you (preferred)
• Flag your question for moderator attention asking them to add your tag

Answer 2

Because, it takes great amount of effort to remove them later. Because, you should know how tagging is supposed to work before creating a tag. Because, right now is a mess as it's and we don't need people creating more tags. We need less tags.

Tags can be incredibly helpful or annoyingly harmful if you are not careful. There is each now and then discussion about removing X or Y tags since they don't make sense or the topics they cover is too large. The restrictions are there to prevent disasters and more work to do for the Community, the moderators and SE team to correct them.