Tag organization

Question

In my opinion tags are very important on this side. It helps to find questions. Especially as we grow this gets more important. Currently we have some disorder in tags and it is not always easy to decide, which tags should be added to a question. Thus inconsistent tagging can arise. This came up looking at equipment.

Currently there are some "subordinate tags" (number of questions in brackets)

• equipment-care (70)
• improvised-equipment (24)
• trekking-equipment (4)
• wet-equipment (1)

In the style of the last two there could be any kind of tags like "tent-equipment", "surfing-equipment", "archery-equipment", ... . Such composite tags are bad. They are redundant with the "parent tag": Do you need to use equipment on a question already tagged equipment-care? It is redundant but without equipment it will be harder to find. Currently many questions tagged equipment-care do not have equipment.

It would be much more consistent and easier to decide on what tag to use, if we had only simple tags. So equipment-care is equipment&maintenance, trekking-equipment is equipment&trekking. Thus it is possible to search [equipment] and find everything related to equipment, search [equipment][trekking] for stuff related to trekking equipment, search [trekking]-[equipment] to get trekking topics not related to equipment, ...

When writing a question there will be clarity as well: When starting to type equipment only equipment is shown, so you do not have to decide between equipment and equipment-care. If it is about caring for equipment, maintenance can be used as well and by synonym, equipment-care would become maintenance.

There are of course useful composite tags. improvised-equipment is a boarder case ("improvisation" could be used in relation to other things) and aid-climbing or free-climbing are certainly viable ("freeing" or "aiding" on their own would be quite useless tags). Still I think it is correct to use e.g. both climbing and aid-climbing, not just the latter.

So what I am asking here is: Do you agree with this generally and/or in the shown example?

If so I will go ahead with retagging questions and suggesting synonyms. I really think this is beneficial.

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_{On a side note: Please upvote the rucksack -> backpack synonym if you can.}

Answer 1

Tags are not about taxonomy and it's okay for things to overlap. If someone can find an answer they are looking for by searching "backpacking tent" or "backpacking gear", that's a good thing.

Some users may want to filter by tags, and that's also fine. But having both a general a specific tag does not cause any harm whatsoever. If you only want to see a very specific topic, then filter by the specific topic.

If tags are truly the same, or unclear - use synonyms or fix them. If one is a subset of the other then there is absolutely no need to remove the more general one.

Answer 2

I think, equipment should be kept as kind of an umbrella tag. If I have a question about hiking boots, I would tag it boots & equipment ( and maybe even hiking ). If you replace equipment by the more specific tags, it will be hard to find a lot of questions. Also, like imsodin mentions in his answer, a lot of questions don't fit well into smaller categories. I would not like to miss equipment on a question like "What do I need for a climbing trip?"

tldr: Keep equipment, but break up the composites like suggested in the question.

Answer 3

Regarding the wet-equipment tag, I asked about it in chat before creating it in chat. The idea was to have a tag related to "keeping" equipment dry and not about equipment to be used in wet environments. That said, I did not create a tag wiki or retag anything else.

I think the equipment tag is not particularly useful since it is too general. I would propose a big retagging effort to remove it and then blacklisting the tag. I would propose that the [tag:equipment-*] tags be limited to things things related to equipment (e.g., purchase, replacement, care, and drying) and not the activities that the equipment is used for (e.g., trekking and climbing) or the type of equipment (e.g., tents, clothing and footwear). In this respect tags like equipment-trekking should be replaced by trekking and some other tag(s) that are more descriptive about the equipment aspect.

Answer 4

EDIT regarding the reaction (finally) after I started retagging:
It seems my going ahead with the suggestion below was not wanted by the community. But at least I finally got a reaction. And so far it seems that those who reacted are of the same opinion as I was at the beginning: Keep the general equipment tag, just (maybe, maybe not) break up compound tags in favor of two general tags.

As an edit to the question would hardly get any notice, I write an answer. It is however an idea of how to proceed, so please go ahead and vote on it to show your (dis-)agreement.

My suggestion (explanation below):
Replace equipment by something more specific like boots whenever possible. Do not introduce composite tags like "equipment-purchase" but use equipment or better a specific tag together with a "purchase" tag. equipment will live on, but its use may be discouraged by mentioning more specific tags in tag wiki and retagging if applicable.

As StrongBad pointed out, equipment is extremely broad and can often be substituted by something much more specific like boots, clothing, stoves, ... However I tried to find out how many equipment questions already have such more specific tag. The following search

[equipment] -[kayak] -[flashlight] -[headlamp] -[crampons] -[carabiners] -[packs] -[electronic-gear] -[sunglasses] -[tents] -[footwear] -[backpack] -[rope] -[knives] -[sleeping-bag] -[shoes] -[canoe] -[boots] -[clothing] -[stoves]

still returned 328 questions. I probably missed some tags, but this number will not decrease drastically. Some of these questions can be improved by a specific tag, but many cannot for a number of reasons. They may ask about a specific item that does not fall into a nice category like boots, they may ask about a number/list of items, they may be very general questions, ... So the only options would be leaving equipment out without a proper replacement or start having a whole bunch of tags like "climbing-equipment", "trekking-equipment", ... which is bad as explained in the question (rather use equipment and trekking).