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(x119) has questions that deal with either:

  • desktop (as opposed to portable) computers
  • an operating system's desktop environment

The tag wiki primarily concentrates on the former meaning, while mentioning the latter as an alternative. The topics are sufficiently different that I think the current situation is not optimal. Will post my suggestion as an answer.

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I think the tag should be disambiguated, for instance to and , with as a synonym for whichever of those is more popular (looking at the first couple of pages of the tag's FAQ, it would seem to be the latter).

I'm willing to go through the questions and retag as necessary, if this solution is accepted.

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    You would only need to retag the questions that apply to the less common tag (let's hypothetically assume desktop-environment), then the creation of the synonym would retag the remaining desktop-computer questions automatically. Before you start retagging, wait a little for community consensus or feedback though.
    – slhck
    Commented Aug 27, 2012 at 17:10
  • @slhck Of course, I had no intention of proceeding with this before getting some feedback :)
    – Indrek
    Commented Aug 27, 2012 at 17:13
  • No objections, downvotes or alternative suggestions for over 5 days, so I'm going to go ahead with this.
    – Indrek
    Commented Sep 1, 2012 at 23:16
  • Sounds good to me. Ping me when done and we'll take care of the mass retagging.
    – slhck
    Commented Sep 2, 2012 at 6:07
  • @slhck Done. I retagged 167 questions as [desktop-computer] (which, as I suspected, was the less popular one), and removed the [desktop] tag from a few questions that had nothing to do with either meaning of the word.
    – Indrek
    Commented Sep 4, 2012 at 2:58
  • Alright; now thinking of it, "desktop" now either means the actual desktop of a computer, or its desktop environment (in the sense of GNOME, KDE, etc.), so we might need to go through them one more time to differentiate that. What do you think?
    – slhck
    Commented Sep 4, 2012 at 5:38
  • @slhck Good point. So if we use [desktop-environment] for software like Gnome and KDE, what tag to use for questions about the actual desktop? [desktop-interface]? [graphical-desktop]? [desktop-metaphor] (per the Wikipedia article)? None of them seem very intuitive. How about just leaving [desktop] for those questions (rather than making it a synonym), and have the tag wiki excerpt point to [desktop-computer] and [desktop-environment]?
    – Indrek
    Commented Sep 4, 2012 at 12:46
  • I would probably just use "desktop", yeah :)
    – slhck
    Commented Sep 4, 2012 at 18:49
  • @slhck Alright, I'll go through them once more and retag as [desktop-environment] where necessary.
    – Indrek
    Commented Sep 4, 2012 at 19:10
  • Thank you for taking the time to do this! If you ask on chat, maybe someone wants to help out?
    – slhck
    Commented Sep 4, 2012 at 19:12
  • @slhck I've been going through the questions, and it seems like in most cases the [desktop-environment] tag would actually be redundant - all except a small handful of questions are about a specific desktop environment, each of which already have individual tags, and adding the generic tag seems unnecessary; after all, we don't tag Windows questions as [operating-system]. So I think for most questions about desktop environments I'll just remove the [desktop] tag, add the specific DE tag where it's missing, and add [desktop-environment] only to those that truly are broad or ambiguous enough.
    – Indrek
    Commented Sep 5, 2012 at 22:08
  • Wanted to quickly get your opinion before doing any actual edits, though.
    – Indrek
    Commented Sep 5, 2012 at 22:09
  • Yeah, that sounds like a good idea, especially the point about tags that are too broad. Absolutely fine with me!
    – slhck
    Commented Sep 6, 2012 at 6:05
  • @slhck I was away for a while, but it should be done finally. I also updated the tag wikis, so this can be marked as [status-completed].
    – Indrek
    Commented Sep 19, 2012 at 0:00

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