Can tags be too specific? [closed]

Question

I just came upon a question with just this one tag¹: readdirectorychangesw²

I was going to remove it in favor of only the winapi and c++ tags which the question lacked. But I didn't – I left that tag, and faced this dilemma:

• on the one hand that readdirectorychangesw seems overly specific. (cgimagecreatewithmask³ would fall in the same category in my opinion).
• on the other, I wouldn't advocate baninating malloc on SO. (So I guess I'm biased, too.)

Do we need a tag for each and every API function?

Should they be removed in favor of tags that target the domain rather than the specific API call?

_{[1] The question itself is, I believe, irrelevant.}

_{[2] ReadDirectoryChangesW [3] CGImageCreateWithMask}

Answer 1

There are two main reason to put tags on a question: to refine searches, and to constitute collections of questions (e.g. subscribing to a tag to see all the questions in that tag). A tag is useful when the word might otherwise not occur in the question, but more often it's useful to separate the questions where the topic is central from those where it's only incidental.

For example, malloc isn't just about one function, it's about the dynamic memory allocation API of C. You'll notice that it has subscribers, unlike cgimagecreatewithmask and readdirectorychangesw. More importantly, I think, malloc should categorize the questions that are about dynamic memory allocation in C, as opposed to those that merely include a code snippet that calls malloc.

Also the number of uses is a first indicator of whether the tag should exist. Contrast malloc's 768 with cgimagecreatewithmask's 3 and readdirectorychangesw's 21. You need to weigh in the topic's popularity though; for example coq only has 20 questions on SO, but it's a well-defined topic with 40 subscribers.

There's a large gap between the whole platform standard library (winapi) and one particular function (readdirectorychangesw). Is there an intermediate tag that could fill the gap? (Something like stdio or curses.) Otherwise, a concept tag like directory would be a good indication.