Flag helpful but no action taken on tag war

Question

In regards to https://stackoverflow.com/q/21650114/1348195

I left a comment suggesting that the author should re-tag his question after he went into a 'tag war' with another high-rep user on the site. (I've corrected it once only to notice the ongoing tag-war later).

After the user responded (misunderstanding the issue), we exchanged a few more messages where I politely (in retrospect it was kind of snarky) tried to explain that the mvc tag is completely inappropriate for that question and he will get a lot less likely relevant traffic and more irrelevant traffic.

Eventually, I invited him into a chat room offering to explain how he could use the system better (he didn't join) and flagged the post for a mod to take care of the tagging issue.

My flag was marked "Helpful" however the moderator did not re-tag the question. They deleted all the comments (which I get, they were meta comments) but did not change the tag.

I wanted to ask why the tag was not changed? Was I wrong in flagging the mod?

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By the way - I can totally see the rationale from a moderation stand point to not engage with the user and re-tag their question which might come off as hostility. I wanted to know if an action was taken or if the user was asked to reconsider. Mainly because I want to know what to do in such future cases.

I'm also aware of and read Why does flag marking as helpful/declined not always correlate with moderator action? . This question is about specifically re-tagging and what mods can and/or should do in this case.

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(By the way, since I invited him to chat a room was created - here is a partial segment of the exchange it is not the whole exchange but it should get the point across).

Answer 1

(Converting my comments into an answer)

In my opinion, what OP thinks a question should be tagged with is not really relevant. Sure, they are asking the question, so they can (and should) already set up a good selection of tags to make sure their question is categorized properly and gets the correct attention. But in general, we can’t expect posters to know what the correct tag usage is.

If we instead would just agree with what OP thinks, then those election candidates talking about cleaning up xcode would be just wrong too. If OP is programming in xcode, and insists that their question has something to do with xcode, then they should be right to tag it like that, right?

But no, that’s absolutely not what should happen. Tags are used to categorize questions into meaningful categories with the primary purpose to organize SO. And that does not necessarily means to agree with OP, especially since OP’s main concern is probably to get their question answered but not to make sure that the question will be valuable forever.

That being said, I think the retagging war went far too far already. On wikis, you usually have a “1-revert policy” (or similar) telling you to revert just once. If you then can’t solve the issue by discussing it with the involved users, get a mod to help you. And that mod should decide for the greater good of the site, which in this case would be clearly to choose the proper tags, ultimately disagreeing with OP.

And yes, I believe that this situation is just the same as the xcode tag situation. It’s just the same principle. It just happens to be the case that the it has been a problem for the xcode tag for far longer and as a result is a lot more messy than the MVC tag or others. But that does not mean that we should allow using incorrect tags just because the tags themselves are less used so misuse is less of a problem. Otherwise, those tags will just become the new xcode tags in the future, and that solves really nothing.

Oh, and btw. comparing it with a potato is a ridiculous comparison given that it’s not an existing tag and is absolutely off-topic. mvc though is—just like xcode—in general on-topic for SO, and also likely not too far off for most questions. But that does not mean that they are still appropriate tags for every question.

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12,000 questions tagged MVC? Game over. Robert Harvey♦

So just because a tag is terribly over- and misused, that gives everyone the right to just use it incorrectly everywhere? You won’t be able to reduce that number if you don’t start somewhere and try to trim it down. I have to say, that such comments are rather disappointing to hear from moderators of this community. With that opinion, no wonder why the close queue isn’t going down either (but that’s a different topic).

Answer 2

One of the foundational principles of moderation is that you shouldn't need detailed knowledge of the subject matter in order to successfully moderate.

By asking a diamond moderator to evaluate a tag to see if it matches a question, you're asking for someone to make a determination based on domain knowledge. Diamond mods don't do that; in general, we don't moderate content at all unless it is off-topic or abusive.