29

The tag doesn't appear to be very useful.

It's used in a variety of ways (for reading, writing, showing, transforming, compiling, translating, obfuscating, obtaining, ... source code) on 1747 questions right now, and doesn't appear to be adding any classification value to the site.

Can we get rid of it?

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2
  • 10
    It is a meta tag, burn it with fire
    – psubsee2003
    Commented Sep 22, 2013 at 16:03
  • There are too many questions for a manual burninate. How can we get assistance from those with access to the tools to automate it?
    – Jonathan Leffler
    Commented May 2, 2015 at 0:39

3 Answers 3

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13

I think this tag is too broad and as such doesn't really add much value. I'm not sure how many people would look for questions related to source code as opposed to e.g. development IDE or something like that. Most would probably search by technologies (e.g. Android) or problems (e.g. encryption).

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11

Considering that nearly every question on the site involves source code in some way, shape or form, a tag saying as much is useless.

I vote "Burninate".

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0

I would suggest that many of these top voted questions which are tagged with source code do benefit from it.

By glancing at the tags, such as:

  • encryption + source code

or

  • python + uml + source-code + diagram

It is informative at a glance and those are likely keywords one may search for to find them.

I do agree that out of those 1,747 questions cited though, not all will be like this. As usual, better quality posting, editing and reviewing should limit the associated tags to those most related.

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4
  • 5
    I disagree even for the top-voted questions. E.g. stackoverflow.com/questions/16062432/… needs source-code-protection or something like that, [source-code] by itself adds no value. I'm not convinced by your UML example either.
    – Mat
    Commented Sep 22, 2013 at 17:23
  • Good point, I agree source-code-protection is a more specific tag. I still feel the tags should aid in search indexing though, where the UML example should help for searches for how to create UML from python source code or vice-versa. It is a very generic keyword otherwise... Perhaps every code should only exist if it has merit by itself that would warrant people favoriting it? I concede that getting notifications everytime someone tagged source-code (or the equally broad source) would not yield me any niche questions to answer.
    – ljs.dev
    Commented Sep 23, 2013 at 7:02
  • 1
    "Perhaps every code should only exist if it has merit by itself that would warrant people favoriting it?" - yes, that's part of the "good tag checklist" items, whether the tag could be used alone on a question, and whether people would want to track the tag.
    – Mat
    Commented Sep 23, 2013 at 7:33
  • OK, you've convinced me, destroy it! Full text search will do a better job of returning those example queries.
    – ljs.dev
    Commented Sep 23, 2013 at 7:42

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