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Our site doesn't have a tag for "will-future".

For such a basic part of English grammar, and for a site with as much question depth as we have, its not an oversight. This tells me there's some mechanism for removing them.

"Will"-future is a standard English tense, and like all the other tenses, the site would benefit from it having its own proper tag.

How are they being removed, and why?

Other tags:
"future-tense" is a synonym of "future-constructions", which is about all future constructions.

"future" is also a mixed bag of nine questions about various future constructions.

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  • I'm assuming that someone downvoted because they don't want the will-future tag? If you're trying to get a sense of whether people want the tag (and not just asking why we don't have it already) it may be worthwhile to add a "yes add the tag" and a "no we don't need it" answer. I wonder though if we wouldn't get the same effect with modal-verbs and future-tense (the future* tags do seem to need some clean-up though)
    – ColleenV
    Aug 16, 2022 at 13:42
  • I think I know why you think the tag has disappeared... EL&U has a will-future tag. ELL does not. (english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/will-future) We make tags as we need them, so they are different between the two sites.
    – ColleenV
    Aug 16, 2022 at 15:23

1 Answer 1

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We don’t create tags and just leave them lying around in case someone needs them. The purpose of tags is to group related questions together, so tags get created when we notice we’re getting more than a couple questions about a topic.

Tags not associated with any question are automatically destroyed at 03:00 UTC every day. If there is a misspelled tag like , or a meta tag like , all that has to be done to destroy it is to edit all questions it appears on and wait. Almost all of the tags you see in the list with zero questions are synonyms of other tags.

In my experience, if you want to get a new tag to stick, find about 10 questions it belongs on to tag with it, and then add a description so people understand what it is for. A lot of terminology people use teaching EFL is regional. One person’s ‘continuous’ is another’s ‘progressive’, so if there is another term that people use for a tag, creating a synonym might be worthwhile. Also, as an aside, prefer the plural for tags that have the form of a countable noun phrase (Should we not use "verbs" instead of "verb"?).

There needs to be a reason for the tag other than “it is something that exists in English”. If we have a set of questions that need to be grouped with will-future that are distinct from questions about future tense, there’s no reason to not create the tag. Tagging questions correctly makes the “related” questions in the sidebar a lot more useful and makes it easier to find and connect duplicates.

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  • As far as you know, there isn't a bot running around removing them? That means the first ever "will" tag was on this question just a couple weeks ago, which I can hardly believe possible. I think it would take deliberate effort.
    – gotube Mod
    Aug 16, 2022 at 15:00
  • @gotube Such tags could have been removed not by a bot but by individual editors. I don't know if that is true, I haven't personally edited any instances of such tags out.
    – David Siegel Mod
    Aug 16, 2022 at 22:54

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