Too much retagging

Question

I know that this is a somewhat recondite and mostly harmless hobby for a few users, but to stop it being vastly irritating for the rest of us can I suggest:

• Retags of questions more than week old should not appear on the front page as newly edited questions.

• That the retaggers get it right. This question Two '==' equality operators in same 'if' condition are not working as intended has had the [equals-operator] added to it. But C++ doesn't have an "equals operator", it has an "equality operator", or possibly "operator==". Pedantic I know, but some of these retags seem to be exercises in pedantry.

And to make a third and hopefully constructive suggestion:

• People should retag the questions in their own area of expertise when the questions are actually posted. If all of those of us that can do this did so, I think a lot of the tag problems would go away, though I still think that only 5K users should be able to create them. I've never counted, but I reckon I retag half a dozen questions a day as they appear.

Answer 1

I... sort of disagree. We need a "don't bump" button, because sometimes retagging a question can have huge ramifications to the answers (If, for example, the asker only says what version of whatever it is they're using in a comment on an answer, that's pretty darn pertinent), and sometimes we're retagging visualC to visual-c.

Answer 2

Having a question show up on the front page after a retagging actually performs a function - quality control.

If we allow "invisible tagging" - or in other words give people a way to edit tags without pushing it somewhere that people check them out, then we leave a huge loophole in the system for abuse.

I know it's annoying, but given the volume of question SO already receives, tagging doesn't add all that much.

Answer 3

I definitely agree that some retags shouldn't bump questions to the front page. Some of these questions are months or years old and already have accepted answers. These questions may be in need of cleanup but are definitely not in need of special attention.

They shouldn't be bumped unless there's been a significant change, and a retag isn't one of those. I'd say the same about minor typo corrections, but I doubt there's any easy way for the system to know the difference; at least with retags, the system knows for sure that the content of the question wasn't changed.

Answer 4

One of the main reasons for retagging is to push the question back up into the queue so that it can be answered by people with expertise in the new tag, especially if they're a week old. Maybe only unanswered questions should get pushed back to the top?

This is a community run site, you are never going to be able to stop people from being wrong, but you can provide incentives. Retagging is one of the only features available at fairly low level reputation that doesn't have a feedback system (vote up or down). Perhaps there should be some way to offer reputation incentives for that

Answer 5

I tentatively agree with not showing retagged-only questions as active. It does seem to be one way to catch abuse (e.g. to revert it). It would prevent mass manual retags (of which I have done in the 20-70x question range) from cluttering the homepage, but that action might be exactly the kind of abuse (e.g. 50x for taxonomist) that needs to be seen.

However, there is something to be said for uniform tagging of equivalent concepts across languages, but at only 18x [equals-operator], that could just as easily swing to [equality-operator] (none currently).

As someone who has this hobby, I do try to get it right (and always appreciate constructive criticism where I go wrong). I suspect I would have chosen equals over equality for consistency, if the distinction had even occurred to me (since colloquially they're pretty much the same), so I can't blame Jon much here.

Answer 6

Regarding the tags on the question you mentioned (because I retagged it), I completely understand the objection.

Yes, I realize it may have been better to use [equality-operator] rather than the existing [equals-operator] tag. However, if we start getting into using both [equality-operator] and [equals-operator], that will result in a mess when new questions are posted (or even retagged). It's a spot for tag synonyms, certainly. Until that's implemented, I think it's better to just group them together in a similar tag instead of being pedantic about it. (Better searchability is the goal, yes?)

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As for the retagging, I completely support any measure taken to:

• Not bump questions to the front page during an obvious retagging. I think it's reasonable that if only the tags change, a question should not be bumped. This would be a feature available only to users beyond a certain rep threshold. (By the way, I would even support this if the rep threshold is above my current score on SO.)
• Increase the rep threshold needed to create tags. This isn't a huge problem per se, but finding those crap tags is. The only filters there are now are (a) seeing a new question with one of these tags and retagging it immediately, and (b) the 10k tools. Even with that, the tags can only been seen near the time of creation. It is currently impossible to get a list of all tags matching a certain pattern. See also, my request to improve the Tag Search user experience. If there was a way to do this, there would be far fewer crap single-use tags in the system, because I would be active in cleaning them up.

It really sucks that people like myself want to help organize the content of the sites, but in the process of doing so, negatively affect the user experience of others, particularly when the site is in a period of low activity.

I try to be conscious of how fast/slow the sites are to throttle my edits, but it's really difficult sometimes. If I feel like doing a retag late at night and no one is asking questions, it's a situation where either I do a fraction of the work I'm willing to do by throttling my edits, or sacrifice usability of the front page. That's no-win if you ask me, so we need to come up with a better option.

Answer 7

I think the "badge for creating a tag 50 or more users have used" should be removed, to stop people re-tagging, using obscure badge names etc in the hope of achieving this badge. It isn't an achievement to have been the first person to post a "C" programming question and so used a badge 50 people are really likely to use.

Stupid tags like "hurts-my-head" should definitely be removed.

Finally, I agree, but I think Qs marked as answered should not be bumped (it is legitimate to bump a question older than so long if it has been, for example, appropriately re-tagged). This shouldn't affect many questions as, as you say, most questions last a week at most.