The below is a personal proposal, this is nothing official. So I do not hold any authority over what I describe below and am merely asking you to follow along - obviously nobody has to. Edits are welcome except for voting scheme, as changing that later on is unfair. So if you don't like that, follow point 1. below: Downvote the question.
Background
Some recent questions about "how/why something is called ..." again triggered usage of any or several of the (alphabetically ordered) tags naming, nomenclature and terminology (if I missed another candidate, please add). In Naming vs nomenclature this has been partially discussed, but no clear stance on what to do has been taken. As we will not reach enough questions to duplicate them by the usual ways, I hope to get a clear result and then a manual intervention by a moderator. Obviously there is no guarantee this will happen, but it can happen.
Why would one even want synonyms (if they actually are synonyms): It more consistently groups questions and only one tag description has to be maintained.
Voting scheme
Therefore I propose to make a clear poll to decide whether these tags should be made synonyms and which should be master. Intended rules:
- If you don't like my rules, if you don't think these are synonyms or if you in general don't thing we should manually meddle with tag synonyms:
Downvote the question. - If you do think at least a subset of these should be duplicated:
Upvote the question and use votes on answers to support your favorite. - If there is no answer that describes the synonym setup you would like to choose:
Create an appropriate answer and make it a community wiki (and optionally state your case).
Answer scheme
An answer should begin with absolutely unambiguous statement of which tags should be synonyms and which tag should be the main tag. A fictional example between eclair, pie and tart:
Synonyms: pie, tart
Main tag: pie
Separate: eclair
After that you could add whatever reasoning you want for your choice (or expand on it, if something is already there).
If you have a much better idea for main tag than the existing tags, you obviously can introduce it, but this will split votes over even more proposals, making a consensus harder. So please consider whether it is actually worth it.
Please, do not use this Q&A for discussion in answers. If you consider my schema as unusable, close-vote, down-vote, comment on and/or edit it, but please don't mess the poll up in case it turns out to be usable.
Termination
This poll should certainly run for some time. Unless they object, I would leave specifying a termination criteria (date, vote count, vote differential, ...) to the moderators. After all it is them who have to do the manual intervention on the tags, so they have the last word anyway.
