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I am certain we discussed this before, but I can't find it (probably comments only, please edit or comment if you find such previous questions):

When tags on a question get changed, it gets bumped to the front, thus masking "real activity", which is not desired. Recently there has been a strema of such cases (Why are there every day so many questions in the "new question list" which are years old but recently modified?) and it has been mentioned in a tag reorganization post (March 2018 tag rename requests). Therefore I'd like to ask the question here due to a current occurrence of this pattern and to document the issue for the future.

Should edits be done that only change a minor tag on a question which hasn't recently seen activity?
And analogously, in the suggested edits queue, should such edits be approved or rejected?

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    We finally get a new enthusiastic user who wants to improve things around here and do the edits the experience users can't be bothered to do and what happens? Experienced users try to shut the newcomer down. Is it any wonder that the site took so look to get going?
    – Charlie Brumbaugh
    Aug 30, 2019 at 13:49
  • @ab2 I would guess that 80% of the tagging round here is carried out by one user. Namely me. Swimming goggles tagged as sun glasses, plagarized content in the wikis, tags mispelled, duplicate tags among other horrors. For other examples of people not careing about the tags, 7 new tags have been created in the past month but you only noticed the one on your questions and the OP of this question didn't realize how one tag was being created per animal type. When I say that experienced users don't seem to bother, its because of experience
    – Charlie Brumbaugh
    Aug 30, 2019 at 20:01
  • @ab2 I am not quite so much saying they are lazy, as much as they really just don't care and aren't going to do anything about it.
    – Charlie Brumbaugh
    Aug 30, 2019 at 23:11
  • @ab2 How do you think I feel when after many months of editing, cleaning meta posts and general expenditure of my time when users who don't know what they are talking about and haven't bothered to help with all of the junk tags suddenly, months later start criticizing how the tags are done? I have been working on fixing the tag mess for almost 2 years at this point and when I say others don't care I mean situations like this outdoors.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/906/… where it took over a year for someone to take action
    – Charlie Brumbaugh
    Aug 31, 2019 at 4:47
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    @CharlieBrumbaugh Caring about tags in general is not the same as monitoring tags. Why should anyone notice that 7 new tags got created? Why should I give a **** that there already are lots of animal species as tags (that doesn't change that it doesn't scale). I am very grateful for your work on fixing and cleaning up tags/wikis/..., but sometimes I believe you would personally benefit from taking that a bit less serious (as in it would prevent you losing some nerves).
    – imsodin
    Aug 31, 2019 at 16:47
  • I notice, because I monitor the page where new tags are created and I either apply them to the other questions or burn the junk ones. If people think one tag is junk, then it stands the other tags like it are junk but no one seems to follow through on that.
    – Charlie Brumbaugh
    Aug 31, 2019 at 17:19

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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No, such edits should not be done and should be rejected in the queue. Any edit to a question that hasn't seen recent activity should be substantial. Just adding or removing a tag or correcting a few minor language mistakes is not substantial. The improvement of the question is much less relevant than the annoyance of having old question a the top of the active questions list. If this is about renaming/combining a lot of tags, open a thread on meta and ask a moderator to do the changes (these won't appear in the active questions list and has been done).

This might be different policy than e.g. on SO, because there activity is a non-factor, due to a flood in questions, such that any improvement in quality is ways more than bumping an old question. However we are "special" with regards to activity, in that we are a mature community with a low question count (as previously affirmed by removing our beta state). So it's natural that some policies may differ from other sites.

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    9/10 users don't come from the from the front page, they come off search engines. In the long run, in the goal of building a library, having answers misplaced is a much bigger problem than a minor irritation of the front page
    – Charlie Brumbaugh
    Aug 30, 2019 at 13:52
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    Do you mean, in the first sentence, ".....should not be done and should be rejected in the queue"?
    – ab2
    Aug 30, 2019 at 19:59
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    I 100% agree with this @imsodin (with ab2's caveat on the spelling :-) )
    – Rory Alsop Mod
    Aug 30, 2019 at 23:02
  • FYI, instead of rejecting 1/10 suggested edits in the past 30 days, this would mean rejecting 2/3
    – Charlie Brumbaugh
    Aug 31, 2019 at 17:20

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