What to do with useless new tags?

Question

Tags are quite helpful when searching for question on a specific topic, and they are also used for Google searches. Therefore a nice base of tags like we have is precious and should not be spoiled by clutter.

Occasionally I stumple over tags I do feel they are quite useless. These include tags that have not much to do with Ubuntu, that may have typing errors, or that are already available (maybe with a slightly other interpunction).

A recent example of such a tag was .deb (note the dot) where we even had a tag wiki suggested already.

What I did here is, I rejected the wiki suggestion and removed the tag from the question (that was already tagged with deb) hoping it will disappear over time.

However I am not sure if I did the right thing. What is your opinion on this?

Answer 1

In this case it could be a synonym, since .deb is deb, in other cases, tags are auto deleted after some time when they have 0 questions tagged under them.

Answer 2

Additional tags can easily be very useful as you say. I added a tag to a "kernel parameter" question, it already had a "grub2" tag, the original question didn't mention a specific boot loader, why is that tag there? I agree it should be as it is useful, but perhaps there needs a more generic tag of "boot loader" ... the permutations could be enormous though.

My addition is for a very likely situation that you need to find this q & a

Without the extra "xen" tag, it makes the perfect answer much less likely to be found.