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It seems we can achieve a consensus on a certain set of tags this time without reading too much into things. Let's clean up sentence-related tags. I just came up with a few ideas, and I present them in separate meta posts so we could discuss each of them.

Proposal: Blacklist

It's a completely redundant tag and serves no purpose on the questions it's on. It's a meta tag, and meta tags have proven to be useful on ELL sometimes. This one is clearly not useful since all of the questions it's on either belong to or don't need the tag at all. I don't want it to come back. We're much better off blacklisting it.

What do you think?

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  • I've not actually participated in tag policing on any of the Stack sites before, so I hesitate to cast a vote, but a look through the tagged questions does seem to indicate that this tag is simply fluff. The questions tagged solely with it can be retagged with more specific tags without trouble. Well, not trouble with choosing a new tag, anyway. Apparently you can't just edit a question and remove/add a tag - you need to make at least 6 characters worth of changes to the text as well. Lord knows why. Also, yay triangles.
    – Damien H
    Commented Mar 24, 2016 at 6:27
  • No @Damien, you can make an edit that solely edits tags. It's just that if you touch the body of the post, your edit needs to be at least 6 characters long.
    – M.A.R.
    Commented Mar 24, 2016 at 6:52
  • That's odd then, because when I go to this question, click Edit, remove the sentences tag and add the future-tense tag, all without touching the body, I get a red box next to the post body and told "Edits must be at least 6 characters".
    – Damien H
    Commented Mar 24, 2016 at 6:55
  • @Damien then I might have misunderstood the edit restrictions. Anyway, aren't there other things in that post that can be improved?
    – M.A.R.
    Commented Mar 24, 2016 at 6:57
  • Certainly, and I plan on doing so, but in cases where the question just needs retagging, having to invent an edit in the body is a little annoying.
    – Damien H
    Commented Mar 24, 2016 at 6:58
  • This restriction is only on <2k rep users. After that, you're free like a butterfly. :)
    – M.A.R.
    Commented Mar 24, 2016 at 7:01
  • Am I then also free to cause hurricanes in Texas? :P
    – Damien H
    Commented Mar 24, 2016 at 7:05
  • Sure. Don't tell anyone who caused that big tornado in Jupiter.
    – M.A.R.
    Commented Mar 24, 2016 at 7:08
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    The tag has been destroyed - if it pops up again now that we're out of beta and it takes more reputation to make a new tag, we will blacklist it.
    – ColleenV
    Commented Oct 21, 2016 at 1:46
  • @Colleen <espresso>
    – M.A.R.
    Commented Oct 21, 2016 at 6:30

1 Answer 1

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The tag has been destroyed - if it pops up again now that we're out of beta and it takes more reputation to make a new tag, we will blacklist it.

This proposal has been up-voted enough that I think there is community support for blacklisting . However, there is some interest in a related discussion: When should the "sentences" tag be used? that indicates some folks might be interested in saving the tag with a proper description of when it should be used.

Because this discussion has no answers and just up-votes, and the related discussion is pretty old, I think that we should take another look at the proposal and how the tag has been used in the meantime. Leave an answer or comment if you want to make a case for keeping the tag (or for some action other than blacklisting).

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  • I would probably have advocated a system that chose a set of tags such as [sentences], [verbs], [letters] etc. to represent the grammatical unit in question, but I don't, for three reasons: (1) The name "sentences" is ambiguous and allows for a lot of confusion. When a learner asks "find vs. to find", they think they're comparing sentences, so why not add the [sentences] tag? And we can't enforce good use of a tag, since that has worked so well before. (2) A sentence may contain one clause or more, and what the question would really about is the clause, not the sentence as a whole.
    – M.A.R.
    Commented Oct 13, 2016 at 5:23
  • (3) Going about and editing all the erroneous cases with the tag is cumbersome. Sometimes a tag is considered useful, but its misuse/abuse would make it impractical to use. [sentences], right now, is such a tag.
    – M.A.R.
    Commented Oct 13, 2016 at 5:28
  • @Rubisco You're preaching to the choir :) I would like to get rid of it because it is often misused and I don't think a wiki will fix it, but it's been a while since we've discussed it. so I want to do a quick double check before acting.
    – ColleenV
    Commented Oct 13, 2016 at 11:23

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