Why can't you suggest tag synonyms without 2,500 Rep?

Question

I was working with a fairly little used tag recently and ran into something annoying. The tag, chromium embedded is referred to more often by its abbreviation CEF. However, CEF was not listed as a tag or synonym. It didn't even think the tag for chromium embedded existed until I found it on a Google search on a topic. I thought I could save another person the annoyance of finding the tag by suggesting a tag synonym, but discovered that isn't possible. I know that if you don't have have the rep to edit a tag wiki you can suggest a tag wiki edit, but was wondering why you can't suggest a tag synonym. Are you suspecting that new users would spam tons on pointless tag synonyms?

Update: I have requested here to add this tag as a synonyms.

Update: CEF tag synonym created.

Answer 1

One of the goals of the reputation system is to give people more access to certain features once they've gained enough experience with the system to fully understand how it works.

On the low end of the spectrum, most very new users don't have a clue what Stack Overflow is about, so to avoid those users doing things that aren't good for Stack Overflow, their ability to do certain things is limited.

There's tons of guidelines on how tags work on Stack Overflow, and a new user is likely to not be familiar with them. However, you can suggest a tag synonym via meta, as you've done, and if users with greater than 2,500 rep agree, they can get the process started.

In your case, your suggested tag is valuable, and Chromium Embedded is more widely known and recognizable as CEF. I would suggest this tag synonym for you, but even at 14k reputation on Stack Overflow, I still must have at least a +5 score in the tag in order to create the synonym, so maybe one of the moderators can add it.

Hope this helps!