How to ensure that questions get super tags?

Question

By super tagging I mean for example adding tags such as visual-studio to a question tagged visual-studio-2010.

Why this would be desirable:

• it is easier to ignore / follow a single super tag rather than every single new version that comes out.

  I can't stand anymore ignoring visual-studio versions (visual-studio, visual-studio-2010-sp1, ...) or every single library for a language that I don't know like javascript (node.js, angular.js, backbone.js, etc.).

  EDIT as Doorknoob mentioned, one can ignore with asterisks as visual-studio* to ignore all visual-studio tags. This would not however work for example for language vs library as in python vs django.

• Employers who want to measure how much visual-studio you know have to add up all visual-studio-XXX without counting duplicates. That would be hard.

Also the top answer for this question at the time of writing says that sub/super tagging is good.

So how do we ensure that super tagging gets done?

Alternatives I can see so far:

• accept retag edits and give people repo for that.

  Dangerous, because I got 200 rep today by adding visual-studio super tags, so even a bot could give someone 2000 rep in 10 days. This would however ensure that super tagging gets done.

• accept retag edits and don't give people repo for them, or give them little repo. I am not sure this is possible, but probably has been suggested (please link to if you know where).

  Of course, if you don't give people repo, many questions will go without proper supertags.

• suggest somewhere that askers supertag and give examples of valid supertags.

For the three abouve options to work, reviewers or askers would need guidelines to what counts as a good supertag, and any such guideline will have many edge cases and be very hard to decide on.

• automatic supertagging. It seems that this has been vetoed by Jeff on his comment, and might be hard to implement.

Or should we reject all supertagging edits, since all of the above have problems? But then, how do we decide what counts as a supertag and what does not? If we decide everything that is not a supertag, wouldn't that be the same as deciding what is a supertag?

EDIT when I asked this I had in mind for it to be a conditional discussion: if we want to add super and sub tags, how should we do it, and not if we should do it or not (true, the way it was asked was very partial). I suggest the question of should we add both tags be moved to this older question which as far as I understand already discusses that. Thinking about it now, this could even be marked as a dupe, because it we decide that we should do something, then we should also decide how at the same time.

Answer 1

Don't enforce use of super tags.

They're unnecessary. They add no extra information. And, in fact, by squeezing out other more useful tags, they remove useful information.

I won't be using tag formatting for most of this post because it does pretty ugly stuff to paragraphs. I'll just be doing [this] instead to indicate a tag.

Another Stack Exchange site has already learned lessons here

Over on Roleplaying Games (for tabletop RPGs, not video games) we deal with this kind of thing in almost every question. We have tags like [dnd-3e] for questions about Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition. We also have [dungeons-and-dragons], which is used on questions related to the entire D&D franchise, and [d20], which is used for the d20 system which D&D 3rd Edition runs on. Both [dungeons-and-dragons] and [d20] are considered parent tags for [dnd-3e].

When a question comes along about D&D 3rd edition, it's tagged with [dnd-3e] and not the other two. Those other two are already implicit, and won't add any new information. They'd just waste two more of the five tags a question can have, and that's about all they'd do.

A case against enforcing super tags

What about when a question is asking about both [dnd-3e] (super tags [dungeons-and-dragons] and [d20]), and [dresden-files] (super tag [fate]), and is also asking about [spellcasting] (super tags [spells] and [magic]) in those systems?

• With enforcement of super tags, the total relevant tags are:

  dnd-3e dungeons-and-dragons d20 dresden-files fate spellcasting spells magic

  Ouch. Something gets squeezed out somewhere. A system gets dropped (very bad), the spellcasting tag and its parents get dropped (also bad but not as bad), or we can't enforce the usage of super tags (making them unreliable, which is bad).

• Without, the question is tagged:

  dnd-3e dresden-files spellcasting

  That's it. You have everything you need to know. How nice is that?

This is not unwieldy for searching

Those looking for questions about all versions of D&D have a tag to search, those looking for questions about the d20 system have a tag to search, and those looking for questions about D&D 3e have a tag to search - and people looking for any of those three can just use an 'OR' statement in their searches.

Plus, to help people with searching: the dungeons-and-dragons tag wiki contains a list of all D&D tags on the site, the fate tag wiki does the same, and we'll continue to do so for other tags in the future which cover a broad selection of tags.

Maybe you could do something similar with your visual studio tag wiki.

Answer 2

Ah, time to resurrect my good old Implicit tagging hierarchy suggestion: While a question about visual-studio-2010 is obviously about that specific version of visual-studio, using the latter tag additionally is nonsense to me - it wastes space for a tag that is already implicitly present, but everyone has to use a visual-studio* wildcard (which fails to render correctly when typing [tag:visual-studio*] by the way...) and this is not possible for other tags where the implied hierarchy is not visible in the name, e.g. class in oop. That's why I suggested an implicit tagging hierarchy, where adding a tag for which unambiguous parent tags exist (a class-members question in c++ should require the c++ tag explicitly since it could also be e.g. python or java, while both class and oop are implicit parents) those tags should be treated as present on search/ignore/favorite queries but not be explicitly waste one of the five tag slots.