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We have fixed more than 332 questions tagged only with grammar - we're down from 1325 to 993. (as of March 19th, 2017) We've probably fixed a lot more than 332, because there are new questions each day tagged with only grammar.


We've had a lot of discussions about the tag:

  1. Poll: Retag questions with the "grammar" tag, or not?
  2. Tag cluster: [grammar], [grammaticality], [grammaticality-in-context], [grammatical]
  3. A proposed solution to the "grammar" dilemma -- Please contribute your answers to the "what is grammar" post
  4. Is This Tag Useful? Episode 1 - The Big Boss (grammar)
  5. Combine tags [grammar] and [grammaticality]
  6. How can the difference between the "grammaticality" and "grammar" tags be described?

Here is what I've pulled out of looking over the significantly scored portions of all of them (number of votes, not necessarily highest score). It's worth reading most of those discussions to get the full picture - this are just highlights.

(+16/-3) Grammar is a bad, bad tag. We should do something about it.

(+12/-2) Remove from most questions and let it remain on one/few 1 question(s) only.

(+6) The tags , , , have no consistent meaning, certainly not a meaning which makes it useful for searching or for informing users what a question is about. (and should all be scrapped)

(+6/-1) Perhaps what might work here at ELL is to remove the tag; render existing questions untagged if they only have that tag in order that they can be dealt with; and then, if it's likely to be useful, reinstate a better-defined grammar tag along the lines of the ELU intention. Some of the now-untagged questions may actually be retagged as grammar.

(+9/-5) The tag is indeed useful. There are many questions that ask for 'grammar' and not anything else. It's true that we have many sub-tags that further classify 'grammar' but that is fine. That is fine probably for those who know which specific problem it is called in their questions.

(+6/-4) I very strongly support the blacklisting and/or burnination of this tag. The help center describes tags as "a word or phrase that describes the topic of the question. Tags are a means of connecting experts with questions they will be able to answer by sorting questions into specific, well-defined categories". There is nothing specific or well-defined about grammar in its usage here.)


Because we seem to like the idea of removing from most questions, but aren't as OK with getting rid of it completely, I think a good place to start would be retagging questions with just the grammar tag. There are about 1300 of them, which is doable in a few days with a few volunteers, and any question with a single tag could probably stand to have the tag reviewed to make sure we couldn't add some more specific tags.

We can make an event of it and get together in a chat room, or we can do it "Adopt a Highway" style and if you're interested, claim a portion of the list in an answer or comment here. If you run into a question and you're unsure of what it should be tagged, we can discuss it here, or we could create a dedicated review/editing chat room for folks that want a second pair of eyes on something.

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  • Yes yes finally wheeeeeeeeeee
    – M.A.R.
    Nov 22, 2016 at 19:19
  • I think you need to edit the bit about ... before the end of the year. We're already in 2017. Perhaps the task could be completed by 2019 :)
    – Mari-Lou A
    Jan 8, 2017 at 18:25
  • @Mari-LouA Done - I hope that some day soon this entire thread will be outdated :)
    – ColleenV
    Jan 9, 2017 at 23:39
  • Another week and we will be in 2019.
    – Mari-Lou A
    Dec 24, 2018 at 11:00
  • @Mari-LouA yep, we gave it a try but the majority of the community just doesn’t care much about tags. The few people that do aren’t enough to make an impact.
    – ColleenV
    Dec 27, 2018 at 20:34

1 Answer 1

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I'm finding repeating offenders, users who have posted dozens of questions using only the grammar tag. One such user is @joe-kim

He has 53 questions that are only tagged "grammar"

Anyone fancy tackling this mission? His questions are not too bad actually, so you wouldn't have to edit them into shape, just replace the ubiquitous grammar tag with something more descriptive.

Another user is Cookie Monster, there are 105 questions 77 questions tagged grammar but many do have two or more tags.

Again, not much work needed. Would be nice if Cookie could do some editing himself, I did suggest it once to him but it fell on deaf ears. Maybe he thinks it's not that big a deal.... he might be right.

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