"-plugin" suffix for specific-software tags?

Question

(Gilles brought this up in his answer to the question Burn the “plugin” tag)

If a question asks for a solution that is required to work with a specific software, it should be tagged with a tag for this software.

Currently, we have two kinds of such tags:

• foobar
  Examples: wordpress, eclipse, mediawiki
• foobar-plugin / foobar-plugins / foobar-extension
  Examples: wordpress-plugin, firefox-extension, vim-plugins

We should be consistent and decide:

Append -plugin/-extension/-module, or not? Or have both?

Answer 1

I think we should omit these suffixes.

Not everything is a plugin(/module/extension/…)

There are cases where a solution is required to work with a software, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be a plugin (or similar).

Example question: Offline WordPress post editor/creator - Here a solution is required to work with WordPress, but it can’t be a WordPress plugin. So tagging this with wordpress-plugin is obviously wrong, so we need a wordpress tag.

But when we need a wordpress tag anyway, …

… what do we gain by having an additional -plugin tag?

Experts in WordPress plugins are very likely also experts in WordPress, and they probably know cooperating tools.

Of course there are cases where a user explicitly needs a plugin (and doesn’t want to use a separate tool), but this is information which can be specified in the question. I don’t think this case necessitates an additional tag.

Some programs have plugins and extensions

For example, Mozilla Firefox has "add-ons" and "plugins". Following the suffix model, we would need three tags:

• firefox (for things not being plugins/add-ons),
• firefox-plugin (for plugins),
• firefox-add-on (for add-ons aka. extensions).

I guess in many cases, users don’t care if a solution is technically a plugin, an extension, a user script or a different tool. The tag firefox could cover all these cases.

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So I propose to omit any suffixes and use the software name as tag value:

• chrome-extension → chrome (done!)
• firefox-extension → firefox (done!)
• wordpress-plugin → wordpress (done!)
• vim-plugins → vim (done!)
• notepad++-plugin → notepad++ (done!)
• bukkit-plugin → bukkit (done, previously retagged by aman207)
• visual-studio-plugin → visual-studio (done!)

Answer 2

Merged and renamed:

• anki-plugin → anki (1)
• chrome-extension → chrome (58, there were only 2 chrome question: 1 explicitly not satisfiable by an extension and 1 looking for an extension)
• firefox-extension → firefox (21, there was only 1 firefox question and it's a problem that's likely to be solved by an extension)
• netbeans-plugin → netbeans (1)
• opencart-plugin → opencart (1)
• photoshop-plugin → photoshop (1)
• wordpress-plugin → wordpress (18, of which 4 had both tags)

Experimentally, an overwhelming majority of questions about X for which an X-plugin or X-extension tag existed were tagged with the -plugin/-extension variant, whether being a plugin/extension in the strict sense was a strict requirement or not. There was no meaningful difference in usage between the X and X-plugin/extension tags. So having the distinct tags did not serve any purpose.