Is there such a thing as too many tags? How do I spot it?

Question

Reading the tags docs:

As a general rule, you should avoid creating new tags if possible, and new users are not allowed to create new tags. Even if you have sufficient reputation, you should only create new tags when you feel you can make a strong case that your question covers a new topic that nobody else has asked about before on this site.

I am under the impression that too many tags is not good. Is this correct? If so how can we identify if we have too many tags?

I ask this because as a moderator, I would like to know how I can best serve my community by reviewing newly created tags and keeping the tags at healthy and organic growth.

Answer 1

Sounds hard to define specific metrics to define how many tags are too many.

I think most tags should pass two basic tests:

• Reading the tag alone, am I able to identify some specific topic which the question will be targeting.
• There should not be another tag that already exists which covers the same exact same topic.

For example, in the Substrate StackExchange, we have tags frame and pallet. While these topics are very similar, I think that these two tags do have distinct topics they are trying to cover.

frame can include questions which are specific to the underlying macros that we create that help users write pallets, while pallet can be used to talk about existing pallets created by the community, or broader pallet development questions.

Another example is polkadot-js and polkadot-js-api. In this case, I think these two tags represent the same thing, and ideally an administrator would go and merge these two tags.

Finally, lets look at api or curiosity-killed-the-cat. The api tag is just way too broad. You cannot easily identify what a question would cover with this tag, and probably it shouldn't exist.

Similarly, curiosity-killed-the-cat is not a real topic or category of questions, and probably needs a more appropriate tag name or to be removed all together.

Answer 2

+1 on both Shawn & Squirrel!

Also note that we can help curate these are things do evolve, and make tag synonyms suggestions that help lessen the load of manual curation & edits of tags (although should be done for explicit duplicates IMHO).

(How can I suggest a tag synonym on Stack Overflow?)

Answer 3

I agree with Shawn for what constitutes a good tag. But I would suggest that at the start we should not be afraid of creating new tags. The common tags will organically rise to the top as they become well used and we can have a tag purge later to clear down tags that are only used once or twice.