Which tag has the highest incidence of downvoting?

Question

I am wondering if there is anyway I can associate a tag with the probability of getting a downvote once a question is tagged with it?

I know there are reasons why downvotes are given.

This is more of a mathematical question rather than a question on guidelines. I would ignore why the downvote was given. Just pure numbers on things as they stand now.

So is this data out there? Can we crunch the numbers to find that tag?

Answer 1

On Stack Overflow, it's ... [agile]. Well, at least if you look at tags which are used 1000 times or more, of which there are ~4000. 48% of the questions tagged [agile] have been downvoted. Not surprising, since it's considered off-topic.

I found it with this query. It's easier to count questions which aren't downvoted, and combine it with the denormalized Tags.Count column which tells you how many questions there are in total.

For reference, here is the complete query:

SELECT t.TagName,
  t.[Count] AS '# of questions',
  ROUND(100.0 * (t.[Count] - COUNT(*)) / t.[Count], 2) AS '% downvoted'
  FROM Tags AS t
  INNER JOIN PostTags AS pt ON t.Id = pt.TagId
  LEFT OUTER JOIN Votes AS v ON v.PostId = pt.PostId
                            AND v.VoteTypeId = 3 -- downvotes
  WHERE t.[Count] >= ##MinTagCount:int?1000##
    AND v.PostId IS NULL -- so we select the questions WITHOUT downvotes
  GROUP BY t.TagName, t.[Count]
  ORDER BY ROUND(100.0 * (t.[Count] - COUNT(*)) / t.[Count], 2) DESC

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Bonus result: the 2nd highest downvoted tag on Meta Stack Exchange is ... wait for it ... down-votes with 69.25%.

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_{I realize that a tag where all questions have been downvoted (100%) would not appear in the query results. I think it's safe to assume that given the >1000 filter, we're not missing any tags.}