Advice on proceeding with PowerShell Cmdlet tags?

Question

I've been answering questions in the PowerShell tag recently, and I began to notice that specific cmdlets have been tagged over time. At first I thought this was oddly specific, but after some thought I think PowerShell cmdlets would make good candidates for tags, if the context of a particular question calls for it.

After reviewing some questions on Meta (1, 2, 3 ) I believe this would be a good class of tags because:

• It is very unambiguous. A question asking about some specific behavior of select-string would be well served by the "select-string" tag, grouping it with similar questions and allowing for easy navigation by future users.
• It would unnecessarily broaden the focus of some questions if they did not have cmdlet tags. Take this question for example, wherein the user experiences some difficulty with the output of Select-String when it returns a collection instead of a single object. The other two tags "PowerShell" and "Regex" begin to describe the problem, but the real issue is with the output returned from the cmdlet.
• It says a lot with a little. "This question specifically concerns this powershell cmdlet." When coupled with even a stub of a tag wiki, new users could learn about this particular cmdlet. Seasoned PowerShell users may recognize the cmdlet immediately, or even subscribe to it if they feel particularly comfortable with the topic.

With this in mind I've selected several existing cmdlet tags and have edited them to include a very basic description and link to Microsoft documentation:

select-string invoke-command get-childitem start-process copy-item

If the community feels that these tags are worthwhile to pursue, I would like to continue fleshing out these existing cmdlet tag wikis by including suggestions on what sort of questions to tag these with, links to useful documentation, and links to related cmdlets. I would also like to create new cmdlet tags for either

• existing questions that are strong candidates to include a specific cmdlet tag, or
• new questions that would demonstrate some problem where this tag is appropriate.

This is my first time really undergoing any sort of tag review, and I would like some feedback as to if I'm going about this the right way. When justifiable, should these specific cmdlets have their own tags? Is there some sort of general procedure that I can follow to perform these edits without spamming up the powershell active listings?

Answer 1

While I agree with your proposal about having separate tags for each of the cmdlets in powershell and appreciate the amount of work you've put in editing their individual tag-wikis, not all the cmdlets can be created as a separate tag.

For example, select-string can be abused as it is still an ambiguous tag (and new users tend to disregard the excerpt shown when tagging their questions). It can be placed with a number of languages where users want to match regex patterns in their strings.

Thus, to ensure proper usage in such scenarios, I'd suggest appending (or prepending) them with either ps1 or cmdlet, so that the tags would be: select-string-cmdlet or ps1-select-string. I'd go for the first choice of appending a harmless cmdlet to them. :)