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I'm hard-pressed trying to find out what we really want our tags to be. Do we want them to make our search easier? Do we want to summarize our question with them, although this is explicitly discouraged in other SEs? What do we want them to do?

The reason I ask this, is that we have many, many bad tags. Good tags are rare, and seldom get applied to questions.

Please keep your answers objective. We're going to refine the tagging system and general-but-nice remarks aren't what we need here. Please boil your answers down to comments on what you'd expect tags to be/do the categories below:

  • Whether if 'experts on should make sense.
  • Whether if we need (a few) meta tags
  • How clear we want the tag name to be
  • How technical the tag name should be
  • Whether if we want tag scopes so large that would cover a few thousand questions or if we want small scopes that would cover no more than a hundred questions
  • Whether if the tag should be an extra hand in searching or not
  • What should be put in the tag wiki
  • So on. / anything else?
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    It's not a bad tag by my standards!
    – Araucaria - Not here any more.
    Commented Nov 4, 2015 at 17:41
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    @Arau what it? And, I believe that's not the question I'm asking here.
    – M.A.R.
    Commented Nov 4, 2015 at 18:10
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    I think you made a mistake by opening your post with a controversial statement. If you really want objective responses, it would be better to set a good example and not start out by kicking the hornet's nest :)
    – ColleenV
    Commented Nov 5, 2015 at 14:38
  • @Colleen I don't see any controversy regarding grammar. The other side -- the ones that argues for leaving grammar be -- hasn't provided a real argument to my eyes. But anyways, I just dropped all this caring for tags.
    – M.A.R.
    Commented Nov 5, 2015 at 19:47
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    If there is an "other side", there is controversy. Anyhow, it was just an observation that I thought might help you get the type of responses you were looking for. It's worth exactly what you paid for it ;)
    – ColleenV
    Commented Nov 5, 2015 at 20:05
  • @Colleen :/ What disappoints me is that I'm unlikely to get the responses I was looking for. I'm done with this laborious work anyway. I realize it's a mistake to try and drink fog using a mug.
    – M.A.R.
    Commented Nov 5, 2015 at 20:08
  • I suspect this question is a little too broad to really work well. Perhaps breaking it down into "how should we define new tags", "how should we deal with existing tags", and "how should we handle miscellanea like wiki goals" would work better.
    – Nathan Tuggy
    Commented Nov 6, 2015 at 0:42

2 Answers 2

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Most users with a modest amount of reputation (say, 300 points) should be able to apply half the tags to their own questions. Thus, tags based on common language lesson types should be common. Similarly, if the poster suspects that the answer is different in America or India or the U.K., they can add a dialect tag. For example:

Editors might refine some of these tags, but learners should be able to provide tags that are in the ballpark.

Similarly, most tags should be terms that most native speakers of English recognize. They might recognize them from their childhood grammar lessons, or they might be able to guess the meanings of terms like or .

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Tags should make it easier to search for duplicate questions. (Of course, the more questions that have a particular tag, the harder it will be to find a duplicate in that tag.)

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    Although, a combination of tags should make it easier to find duplicates if the tags are orthogonal. So verb+tense not very helpful but conjunctions+plural might be.
    – ColleenV
    Commented Nov 6, 2015 at 12:55

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