Which tags on stackoverflow do you think needs to be improved and how? [closed]

Question

Based on your experience in the tags that you're active in, do you think that activities[*] in certain tags more than others need improvement? What do you think are the problems, and how would you suggest we try to improve the situations?

[*] Activities includes how questions are asked, answered, voting pattern, how comments usually go, etc.

Answer 1

It looks like there's a lot of room for improvement in [regex]. There are too many questions where people keep on asking "I need regex for this", "I need regex for that", and the highest voted answers are often the ones that just says "here you go" and "there it is". The ones that actually explains HOW and teaches things takes time to write, and thus usually gets buried with little reward, or even worse, downvoted because it's just "too long" of an explanation instead of just getting "straight to the Fish™".

Other "problems" with [regex]:

• People often fail to mention which flavor they're using
  • Also evidenced by many "which flavor is this?" comments
• The insistence of using it despite existence of better alternatives (e.g. parsing HTML), and the awkward situation that this puts for answerers
  • Also evidenced by many "regex isn't the right tool for this" comments
  • Sometimes even a best effort answer gets downvoted, perhaps because people think it's "harmful" to provide regex when it's really inappropriate for the situation
  • Sometimes what should've been a "don't do this with regex" comment is given as an "answer", which then acquires numerous votes (because it is an excellent point). This reward propagates the cycle which leads to more and more "don't do this with regex"-type "answers".
• The duality between the actual regex pattern vs the String literal to represent said pattern (e.g. \w\/ vs "\\w/")

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Possible solutions

• Perhaps whenever someone asks a [regex] question we can trigger a language check prompt (e.g. "you have not identified which flavor this is for, we have identified that this information is usually crucial", etc)
• Perhaps a [regex] reference "FAQ" is a good idea. It's essentially a CW index to various questions on stackoverflow that covers most of the basics. It can supplement the search functionality, which can be hard to use effectively if you don't know what to look for, but a comprehensive index can cover the most typical scenarios, answers to common mistakes/problems that gets asked repeatedly, etc.

Answer 2

Anything mis-tagged with a version number when it has nothing to do with a version, which I find to be a pretty decent percentage of occurrences.

For example, here's a c#4.0 question right now.

Answer 3

[algorithm]

The way questions are asked:

• Bad Tagging: I suppose this is a problem with other tags too. Questions not really relevant to this tag are tagged as such. I suppose nothing much can be done, other than re-tagging and educating the question asker.

• Asking the wrong question: Usually people generalize their questions and this makes their problem much harder. There is a 'clarification' dialogue which follows because of that. No good solution other than letting the asker know to specify any constraints etc next time they ask a question.

• Best Algorithm: The questions sometimes ask, 'which is the best algorithm for this?', which is usually meaningless without specifying what defines best, or the underlying model/constraints etc.

• Too many homework problems: I believe this tag has a good percentage which are homework. Educating the askers might not help and might even get ignored.

The way questions are answered:

• Quick, correct looking but wrong answers: Sometimes we get quick answers which may look right, but are wrong and either fail for certain input, or have the wrong stated time bounds etc.

• NP-Complete looking problems: People usually look at the problem as a specific case of a known NP-Complete problem and quickly claim NP-Completeness, which is quite wrong.

• Only code answers: People just post code without any hint as to what they are trying to do.

• Benchmarking: Sometimes people write benchmarks comparing two algorithms and claim that their algorithm is superior. Without knowing the actual constraints/scenarios/data etc, this could be a pointless and misleading exercise. Even when it could be relevant, sometimes they have bad implementations which make it pointless again.

Voting patterns:

• Voting up wrong answers: Quick, correct looking but wrong answers are voted up quickly, while well-thought out and correct answers which come a few minutes/hours later are buried under. This is probably a problem with other tags too.

• Not enough downvotes: People seem to downvote very rarely in this tag. This is all the more needed because of the above issue.

• Voting up answers with benchmarks: If your answer has a benchmark, you are sure to get a couple of upvotes. I have even seen comments saying 'voting up because of a benchmark' without even checking to see if it is needed, and if that benchmark's results can even be trusted.

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Do we need a CW-built index to common [algorithm] questions?

Yes. As an example, there are dozens of dupes on generating permutations and combinations alone, and some people couldn't search for these effectively because they didn't know what these concepts are called.

Answer 4

[.net] is frustrating, because it does and doesn't pick up [C#], [VB.NET], [F#]. If it either picked up all or none it'd be ok, but with it the way it is you never know what you'll get.

Answer 5

[subjective] is frustrating.

The tag is often applied in a very subjective way, and often contradicting the dictionary meaning of the English word subjective.

Answer 6

[staus-deferred] is currently used to say two different things:

• We'll think about that later
• We think that's a third party problem and we hope they'll do something to fix it.

See Joel's comments in this question for more info.

IMHO, it should be split out into two more accurate tags.