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On this question, I received the feedback

Tags are never for content, only for limiting search results. Also, "uk" isn't a location. "UK" would narrow it down somewhat, but "uk" is meaningless babble.

Aside from the tone, is this correct that tags should not be used to indicate details on the questions?

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  • I only have time for a quick comment. Tags are definitely for content, in conjunction with other tags. I have submitted a tag description for the identification tag. I hope it will be at least partially approved to clear up this kind of confusion. In the meantime, check out our other identification questions and you'll find the location in most of them.
    – Sue Saddest Farewell TGO GL
    Aug 30, 2016 at 15:53
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    The "uk" versus "UK" was in reference to something you wrote in a comment (since deleted), not to the "uk" tag. Presumably you meant "United Kingdom", which is a proper noun and therefore needs to be capitalized. Presentation matters, a lot. When you come here and ask others for a free favor, writing that says "eh, you lot don't matter" is not a good idea.
    – Olin Lathrop
    Sep 2, 2016 at 20:15

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I started using SE three years ago because I had lots of programming questions where Stackoverflow was (and still is) a big help. There you'll see that tags are an important instrument to identify e.g. which (script) language is used and the question is based on. People aren't asking e.g. 'how to count all lines of code in a directory recursively in bash?' they are often doing it this way: How to count all the lines of code in a directory recursively?

I see Stackoverflow being the standard for SE, so do I like the way tags are used. If the tag uses capital letters or not is pretty much of no interest and isn't changing anything (you can only use lower case).

Of course you can use tags to filter out data, but that's just a nice feature and isn't excluding the value of the tag for the singular question itself.

As I wrote in the comments to your question, I think you did everything just fine @Chris!

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  • Many, maybe even most, SE sites are not like SO. I'm mostly on EE, Engineering, Photography, and here. These have nowhere near the volume, and in part because of that, the customs that SO has. SO is a special case and not a valid comparison to a much much smaller site like this one.
    – Olin Lathrop
    Sep 3, 2016 at 12:08
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You need to make sure that the body of your question stands on its own. This means tags, and to some extent the title, should not be counted on to add content. It's really not a big deal to put the information right into the question where it belongs.

Some people, including me, simply tune out tags. Unless I'm searching, I ignore them and therefore even forget they exist. Since I don't regularly make any use of tags, my brain has long ago filtered them out. Tags are short by their nature, so there is really no excuse not to include any pertinent information they may add directly to the question.

Even if you think tags should be the only place for some content, you have to realize that's just not how many people will see them. To get better answers and fewer downvotes and votes to close for being unclear, spend the extra second per question. It's so easy to do, there really is no reason not to, and some reasons to do it.

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  • I completely agree that tags should be treated as an independent entity. So all information that are essential to the questions should be in the body (text).
    – imsodin
    Sep 7, 2016 at 14:09

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