How should we moderate tags on answers?

[Stefan Kohler]

From a certain karma level you're allowed to retag questions here on answers.atlassian.com. Before I go crazy and clean out the whole tag list (over 200 tags already) I asked myself the question if there is a policy or something?

What I see happening is a rapid grow of tags but a lot of those don't add any value or are sort of duplicated. So is ie. 'plugins' being used, but 'plugin' is a tag as well.

So how could we handle that, tags are in the long run the one way of finding relevant information here (there just like topics on a forum) so I would like to keep them as clean as possible ;-)

[TylerA · Accepted solution]

Re-tagging a Question should really only be done in the case of "gross violations" of tag definitions (e.g. tagging something as "universal-wiki-converter" when it is clearly a JIRA usage question). As for adding tags, the four pages of tags (well over 200 now) suggests that instead we should look at reducing the number of tags instead.

"Off-topic" should never be the case nor should "spam"; those are items to be deleted, downvoted, or closed (and yes, I think we should aggressively delete, but that requires moderator powers, not retagging powers). Version numbers also make sense, but we're looking at adding a separate field for such things as the version discussed is very important when considering the relevance of an answer/solution.

To answer Jobin's comment, if you aren't selective about your Favorite Tags, that leads to spam, yes. Worse, if others apply tags without using them sparingly, you end up with spam, which leads back to the first paragraph.

I don't think this is the end-all solution, but let's not jump in and start using the retag power with abandon. Be selective, be very careful, and if possible, don't. Better to leave things be than "to destroy the furniture while trying to buff out a spot of dirt."

[Lis Riba]

A) How much karma level is required to retag?

B) I see a number of one-off typoed tags -- alassian instead of atlassian, testng which should be testing, etc.

My inner-librarian is itching to correct and consolidate some of these one-offs...

[Jeremy Largman]

It's in the FAQ (in case it changes). Right now, it's 150 karma.

[Andrei [errno]]

agreed. i would suggest a couple of rules

• conjoin mulitple-word-tags with "-" and not "_"
• use plural - "plugins" vs "plugin"
• add "off-topic" to spam - then it is easy to filter out those
• avoid version numbers as tags

[Jeremy Largman]

Since your comment we've implemented a tag wizard. It still might not be enough! I've opened a feature request for adding spaces to help organize things. I'd be curious to get ongoing thoughts:

Create spaces to organize information

[Jobin Kuruvilla [Adaptavist]]

Totally agree with that! I am missing the old (or soon to be old) setup where the products had dedicated forums. Tags are no substitute for that.

I am now bombarded with mails but sometimes don't recieve few good ones - confused!