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Many of our tag names are pretty inconsistent. So we e.g. have:

, , , , , ,

and several others in this line. Those examples show the following inconsistencies:

  • singular vs. plural forms (editor / editors)
  • nominalized verbs versus nomens (editing / editor)

All in all, it looks a bit messy. Shouldn't we clean this up? If so, what should our guidelines be? Can we adapt them somehow from any matured SE site, to stay even consistent "at large"?

EDIT:

Yes, I'm aware that only mods can rename a tag (see: How to rename a tag?). If we feel it's worth it, that's the way to go. If not: I'd prefer keeping the "status-quo" over creating redundancy by using synonyms only differing in their last 1..3 characters.

Singular vs. plural tags

There seems to be a consent on always using plural forms for tags (with few exceptions where plural doesn't make sense):

Forms: nominalized verbs vs. plural forms

Here it seems might be more exceptions, as different forms might have different meanings. Still, if that's not the case, we might want to set a preference:

Speaking of guidelines...

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    plural vs. sigular: The guideline is plural as long as it makes sense (see the link).
    – Angelo Fuchs
    Mar 19, 2015 at 9:16
  • @AngeloFuchs I knew it was somewhere. Thanks for digging it up!
    – Izzy Mod
    Mar 19, 2015 at 9:33
  • As Angelo pointed out it might not be worth the trouble (and I see his point in that at least partly), we should at least decide for future tags: Apart from always using plural forms, do we want to have *ors or *ings – or doesn't that matter at all? I'm not speaking of possible exceptions (where there is no "ing/ors", or they are describing different things), but a general guideline.
    – Izzy Mod
    Mar 20, 2015 at 10:31

1 Answer 1

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I think its not worth the trouble. We should stick with whats used the most currently and synonym new tags to that.

To ease up that process we should up-vote the M.SE discussions that aim at improving the tag-synonym process.

  1. Allow people with domain knowledge vote on synonyms
  2. Improve the Tag Synonyms in general
  3. Fix ambiguous tags in cases where a synonym doesn't cut it.
  4. Mass-Retagging-Queue to make it easier when something to fix pops up.
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    I disagree with "simply create synonyms". AFAIK renaming a tag (as opposed to "retagging") is not too difficult a task (mods: correct me if I'm wrong here). When adding a tag to a question, people start typing – and the right one pops up before they are ready (i.e. in most cases they'll click it before having typed the suffix) – which is what synonyms are for usually (lead to the correct tag), so they would be superflous here (and just make a bigger mess).
    – Izzy Mod
    Mar 19, 2015 at 12:34
  • @Izzy renaming requires a mod. Creating synonyms does not. My point is that whatever you do, wrong tags will reemerge until you synonym them to the right one. So you can skip the renaming step and go directly to the synonym step.
    – Angelo Fuchs
    Mar 19, 2015 at 18:29
  • I see your point – but still disagree. It makes no sense to me to duplicate the tags into synonyms just differing by the last 1..3 characters. Last time I checked we had more than one mod. So if this is felt important enough and agreed to by the mods, one of them should do the renaming. If not, I'd prefer keeping the "status quo" over creating redundancy.
    – Izzy Mod
    Mar 20, 2015 at 10:14

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