Tag: when are they useful, when they are not and when they harm

Question

Ok, someone might remember in chat that I asked what is the tiling useful for? I still don't find any use but being merged/changed to window management (don't confuse with window managers, which are tools to do window management). But my question is not about that but is what set in motion the next I will say.

While I was reading the tagging help page I found something interesting: Tags that doesn't carry a meaning for themself should not be used (so called meta-tags). Meta-tags (at least how I interpret them) are tags that whenever they are alone in a question, they don't rise the value of the question. That remembered me a discussion about questions that only have version tags.

If we leave a version tag in a question, by itself doesn't help to organize the site (in fact it needs several or more tags), and since either way in the question the version of Ubuntu should be pointed out whenever is relevant, for me it falls in the category of a meta-tag.

But then, I found http://meta.askubuntu.com/questions/1514/when-should-we-use-the-versions-tags and reading the reason it made me think:

It could be used for determining the age and relevancy of the question.

For that is the "asked" and "active" section at the right.

Tags can be used for searching: https://askubuntu.com/questions/tagged/11.04+upgrade

For that we could use: https://askubuntu.com/search?q=11.04+[upgrade] and it gives even more relevant results since answers can not be tagged and some questions are not properly tagged either.

I find the version tag more useful to questions related to upgrades, bugs, drivers and the use of new software like Unity.

Upgrades question normally (if not always) includes the versions from/target in the question itself, so it's redundant. Bugs are off-topic on the site. If a driver installation answer don't work for an specific version of Ubuntu, either the answer should be expanded or another answer be made and specify for what version of Ubuntu it works.

Jeff seems to share in great part my vision, and he predicted that it could be actually dangerous (I've seen suggested edits just to add a version tag,, and as I said before, questions with only version tags).

I have found answers that, through they have a 12.04 tag attached those apply for 12.10 and 13.04 too, and in some cases if they don't work, someone adds another answer for another version of Ubuntu.

Another problem with these tags (not only the version specific) is that they don't say anything about the questions with the tag.

As part of organizing tags, which list I'm still compiling for tags that require some love (love = (disambiguation | change | merge | synonymize | wiki/excerpt | nuke)) the version tags should also follow.

We could follow the guide identifying meta tags:

• If the tag can’t work as the only tag on a question, it’s probably a meta-tag. Every tag you use should be able to work, more or less, as the only tag on a question. Meta-tags, like [beginner], [subjective], and [best-practices], are useless by themselves — they tell you nothing at all about the content of the question.
• If the tag commonly means different things to different people, it’s probably a meta-tag. In a cruel, ironic twist, the meaning of the tag [subjective] itself … is actually subjective. Ditto for [best-practices] and [beginner]. Best practices to whom? Beginner by what criteria? These tags are impossible to define by anything remotely resembling an objective metric. In comparison, the the meaning of tags like [java], [c#], and [javascript] are crystal clear to all but the nuttiest of nutbags.

I'm tagging this question as discussion. I believe that sometimes my words has some imperative tone, but believe me, I like to hear people opinions more than express my very own (unless you ask for my opinion expressly).

BTW, the meta-tag [meta:tags] has in its excerpt that "Questions about tag and tagging" but there is also the [meta:tagging] tag. -_-

Answer 1

It's hard to know exactly what you're targeting or asking for with your post so I'll just go through it step by step.

1. Tags like tiling aren't meta, they're adding specificity. We could boil everything back until we had just one tag (ubuntu) and that would be great except that tags would then be completely useless. Tags are supposed to embellish and describe what a post is about. Being over-specific is not a bad thing but being too vague is.

   In reply: Adding in lid and sharing to the debate... Along with tiling, these are all trying to mean something quite specific. The action of closing/opening your laptop and sharing files. Can they be improved? Sure. Pick the right *-sharing and perhaps rename tiling to tiling-window-manager. I don't know what to do with lid but I think there's value in its use that power-management doesn't cover.

2. Bad tagging shouldn't be an excuse for dumping tags, it should be a call to fix them. Version tags shouldn't be used alone; very few tags should.

   In reply: Some of your questions could benefit from a little extra tagging. The aim isn't to just find one tag that covers the main point, it's to find five tags that apply. This is because similarity between questions is derived from their overlapping tags.

3. Version tags do add information. As Jorge's answer points out, some issues are inherently tied to a particular version of something in Ubuntu and knowing what version of Ubuntu you're running tends to point out which version of the application you're struggling with.

   In reply: Per #2, having a version tag doesn't hurt, it helps. This is going to become a lot more pronounced and obvious in ten years time once we have shifted graphics stack a few times.

4. When something becomes not about one version of Ubuntu, the version tag should be removed, or you should add the other versions it applies to. That's a pretty simple edit. By extension, version tags are not a requirement for questions and never have been, they're just useful when relevant.

5. I don't see how the citation from The Death of Meta Tags applies to what we're talking about here. Tiling, upgrade and version tags all fail the final part of the first bullet you quoted:

   they tell you nothing at all about the content of the question

   Per my #1 and #3, they tell you plenty about the content of the question. They aren't meta tags.

   In reply: Please stop twisting those blog post quotes into making things "meta tags". Meta tags describe the post instead of the question. That's what meta means and that's been made painfully clear by the examples in the blog post. We're still talking about things that describe the question or the problem.

   While they might not be great tags but even on their own in each case, they can still be used to tell you something about the question. If they can be improved (sharing→file-sharing, tiling→tiling-window-manager), make that improvement, but calling them "meta" and removing them is destructive.

None of what I'm saying means there's nothing that needs improving in the tagging system and how people have used it over the site because there is plenty to do, I'm just suggesting you're being a little over-critical of tags that do have a purpose here and that you'd do better just to focus on crappy tagging.

I'd focus on making good questions with crappy tagging easier to find, by point of example, finding answered questions with a score of +2 or greater with only one tag, or only a version tag. Making those better interlinked improves their chances of being found by the new question wizard and stopping duplicates.