Meta Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for meta-discussion of the Stack Exchange family of Q&A websites. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
On StackOverflow, I often see questions by newbies tagged with separate words that should have been a single tag. For example, just now I edited google app engine python to read google-app-engine python. An understandable mistake for someone who doesn't yet know how the tags work.
Generally, users with editing powers will quickly fix this. But maybe we can come up with a way to prevent the problem altogether?
I think this means we should really be considering redesigning the tagging interface. Not to add more work to Jeff and co. but if the tag interface is a single text box with only cursory hints as to how it's used, it's no wonder people keep putting spaces inappropriately.
Perhaps five text boxes, one for each tag (since there already is a limit on how many tags) would make the situation clearer. Then we can unambiguously convert spaces to dashes and make adjustments, knowing clearly (or clearer) what a confused newbie meant.
That may not be the cleanest or most friendly solution, but it is just an idea. I'm just presenting it as an alternative to the current interface, which seems to cause confusion.
This might be related to ...
... although [google] and [python] are reasonable tags, [app] and [engine] should probably be blacklisted (in a more gentle way?) as too general to be useful?
In the popup tag selection box, the top entries should be known tags that have the previous tags joined by dashes. This won't prevent the problem completely, but it could make the asker stop and think "oh, maybe that's what I really want".
