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For questions and answers, you can flag it for moderator attention, but I see no such feature on tags. The fact of the matter is 250 reputation is a lot less than 2500, and a lot of useless tags are going to float around on most sites, especially beta ones with less high reputation users. Adding an option to flag tags will let lower reputation users who browse tags do something when they see a bad tag other than just ignore it or post something on the sites meta, both of which are much worse options than just flagging a useless or bad tag.

Edit: as pointed out by the tinkeringbell in the comments, flagging tags might not be the best idea. Maybe instead add a queue where bad tags are, similar to the re-open queue for questions. The way I imagine this working is that one user with not enough reputation to get rid of a tag marks it for the queue, where users with enough reputation to get rid of tags can review the queue and delete tags that are a bad fit for the site. Also, to prevent trolls maybe scale the amount of people needed to delete a tag based on how often the tag is used.

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    Why would flagging be a much less worse option than posting on meta? For example, people don't like it when things are done 'without discussion', and in that case, there was a bit of discussion but it was limited to a few users in chat. That will only get worse, as only moderators handle flags.
    – Tinkeringbell Mod
    Commented Mar 24, 2021 at 14:16
  • What would the outcome of a flagged tag be? And who would make that happen?
    – Luuklag
    Commented Mar 24, 2021 at 14:17
  • @Luuklag maybe a queue similar to ones for reopening questions?
    – Ekadh Singh
    Commented Mar 24, 2021 at 14:20
  • @Tinkeringbell when posting on a sites meta your question might get ignored. Also, maybe instead of a flag, there might be a vote to delete, so the community will have a say in it, and low reputation users can “suggest” adding a bad tag to this queue for higher reputation users to check out? Also, posting about tags in meta clutters the meta with things that aren’t going to be useful in 2 days.
    – Ekadh Singh
    Commented Mar 24, 2021 at 14:23
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    @Yay as for ignored; if that truly happens you could flag the post for mod attention. I wouldn't worry about clutter, there are almost 95k questions on this site including a whole bunch about tags, and they still don't make finding the stuff I look for impossible ;-) For the rest, Catija's answer explains things well.
    – Tinkeringbell Mod
    Commented Mar 24, 2021 at 14:28

1 Answer 1

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The path for getting rid of a bad tag is to edit it and remove it from posts so that the system deletes it after 24 hours. That means that the better option (assuming the tag only appears 1-2 times) is to just edit the post it appears on (or suggest an edit and leave an explanation for why the tag should be removed) and remove it.

If the tag is being used on more than 1-2 posts, then a discussion on meta is beneficial so that the community can weigh in to decide whether removing the tag is appropriate or not and allows users who can edit fully (2k reputation) to just remove the tags quickly without going through the review system.

Also worth noting that, in most cases, single-use tags will be removed by the system after six months.

But in all of this process, there's no need for moderator intervention at all unless the tag is on 100+ posts and they need staff to help with the burnination process. Creating a flag for this would mean that the mods have to do all of the work of editing or starting meta discussions - this... is not what mods are there for. The powers of curation are left to the entire community - having users pass the buck on problematic tags and make the mods handle them instead of doing the work themselves isn't fair to the mods.

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