Are meta tags banned across the board on all Stack Exchange sites or can each site decide if it wants to allow meta tags?

Question

I think it was now six years ago that Stack Exchange told us that meta tags are bad. They convinced me.

Up till now we'd managed to keep them off the travel site. Though I suppose a couple of our tags there could have cases brought against them being meta, that had never happened so I think we pretty much believed we were free of them.

Until recently I noticed we acquired a [rationale] tag there. To me this is clearly meta. I started a meta question about getting rid of it because it's a meta-tag and then found we already had a question wanting to get rid of it that did not analyse it as a meta tag.

Anyway that's the background. In the ensuing debate, one of our users stated that each SE site gets to decide whether they want to allow meta-tags or not.

But is this true? My reading of the original blog post against meta-tags were that they're no good for SE and I interpreted that as policy.

If we know it's an SE policy to not use meta-tags then we can argue our case that way.

But if it is indeed open to each site to decide re. meta-tags then we may have to vote on it to proceed.

So what's the story? All bad or up to us?

Answer 1

For a quick historical background, tags were designed to describe the subject of a question. That is the purpose of the feature and how the UX was designed. But it wasn't long before folks started using tags to describe other axes than what the question was about. We've all seen tags like [homework] or [big-list] or even [subjective]… but it wasn't long before folks started creating tags to convey things like:

• This question is too easy to be considered worthy of an expert site
• This question needs more references
• This question won't offend the sensibilities of a vegan user
• This question won't offend the sensibilities of a kosher user
• This question may offend someone who doesn't like to talk about body parts
• This question is part of an online project for Ms. Whirley's class — I am not making this up

Sticking to the core purpose for which tags were created is one of those policy decisions that saves us a lot of in-fighting about when and how to go outside the intended use case of a feature. When folks start creating other axes to categorize content, it isn't long before someone else wants to slice it up to fit their vision of the site too (i.e. "everyone please tag questions this way so I no longer have to see them"). That is soon followed by: "five tags isn't enough to categorize all the ways we need". This is the naming debate in a different form. This isn't hypothetical; it's history.

Consider also that these use cases often hamstring the devs trying to improve this stuff. It's not always easy to see how an ad hoc design might break a feature, but it happens all the time. It feels like a weekly occurrence where I write up some great feature improvement to fix a long-standing problem… only to have it shot down because of the rare exception — often from someone using that feature for something else.

Answer 2

Some sites do unambiguously allow meta tags, such as the soft-question tag on the maths sites.

I don't think the definition of meta tags is all that clear. From the blog post (from meta.cooking):

The reason meta-tags are a problem is that they do not describe the content of the question. They describe some other aspect of the question, like the author's skill level, or the author's motivation for asking it, or generally what "kind" of question it is (poll, how-to, etc.).

Well kind-of-question tags are really common all over the place, from story-identification on Sci-Fi & Fantasy, to single-word-requests on English Language & Usage, to biblical-basis on Christianity. If these are considered to be meta tags, then many sites are definitely deciding for themselves what to allow.

I think the common thing about all of these tags is that they have attached site policies to them:

• soft-questions are always often community wiki
• story identification requests have to be as specific as possible
• word requests have to show the context they would be used in
• answers aren't allowed to argue against the premise of a biblical-basis question

These tags are all very useful in that they explicitly signal that these extra policies must be followed.