Cleaning up a bad or ambiguous tag is a very annoying and disruptive process. While there are moderator tools for renaming and merging tags, there is no tool that helps splitting a tag or removing a bad tag and replacing it with useful tags.
There are two ways one can currently clean up a tag, performing the whole retag job in one go or splitting it up into small pieces over time. The main reason to split it up is to avoid the frontpage from being completely disrupted by all the questions bumped through the retagging.
There are some significant problems with the current approach. Doing it all at once has the following problems:
Bumping the questions pushes new questions from the frontpage, completely disrupting it for a while.
It is no longer ensured that the community reviews the changes, if there are so many that they overflow the frontpage.
Difficult to organize for a large amount of tags, you need enough people retagging at the same time to finish the job.
Retagging in small batches is often the preferred approach, but also not without problems:
On slow moving sites you have to wait pretty long between batches because the frontpage doesn't move fast enough.
The bad tag cannot be eliminated quickly and continues to accumulate new questions.
Can be difficult to keep track of already retagged questions if you only clean up a tag, but don't eliminate it.
So I'm proposing a new tool for dealing with this, inspired by an earlier feature request by Grace Note. This earlier suggestion is not likely to be implemented, as the current consensus in the SE team seems to be that even mods should never have the ability to do silent retags without bumping. The difference in my proposal is that it would be based on peer-review, so that multiple users are needed for a non-bumping edit.
The idea is that a moderator can queue up tags that need work in a publicly visible list and any user can suggest a retagging and high-reputation users and moderators can approve them. Peer review would be mandatory for these non-bumping retags, so moderators have no supervote, they would need another user to also approve the retag.
When the retag is approved it would be removed from the list and the question would be silently retagged (no bumping, but a revision). There should also be an option to vote for "no retag necessary", or maybe also an alternative retag if the proposed one is not good enough.
The list of performed edits would be persistent and should be linked from the meta post that proposed the mass retagging, to allow further review by the community.
This tool would prevent the frontpage from being flooded by old questions, while still ensuring that the retags are reviewed.
Any ideas or comments on this?