I've just noted that on Stack Overflow, .Net users seem to have created a load of tags like "2.0", "3.5", "4.0". This seems to me to be a bad idea, (though I realise that some .Net programmers believe that SO was created for them alone) and they should all be retagged as .Net2.0 etc. and the creation of numeric tags be banned in future.
3 Answers
A quick look through the questions tagged 2.0 reveals that it's not just .NET users. That's unfortunate, since it will make retagging a manual process. That ambiguity makes me even more strongly in favor of banning the tags.
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8Dang, and I was just about to ask a question about calculating the next digit of
3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510582097494 45923078164062862089986280348253421170679821480865132823066470 93844609550582231725359408128481117450284102701938521105559644 62294895493038196442881097566593344612847564823378678316527120 19091456485669234603486104543266482133936072602491412737245870 06606315588174881520920962829254091715364367892590360011330530 54882046652138414695194151160943305727036575959195309218611738 19326117931051185480744623799627495673518857527248912279381830 1194912983367
Aug 4, 2010 at 12:42 -
1@tvan: I was wondering what the folks at the Math SE site would think of banning numeric tags. Mathematicians name the really important numbers though. :) Aug 4, 2010 at 12:43
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@kip - I figured it was a known issue so I didn't report. I vaguely recalled seeing something about it, but I thought it was fixed. Apparently, he never got around to implementing it for comments. Aug 4, 2010 at 14:04
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My Chrome 5 feels all jerky and slow because of that format bug. Strange.– PekkaAug 4, 2010 at 15:20
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@tvan no fixes "work" for variable size areas like comments. Sorry. Aug 4, 2010 at 22:12
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Agreed.
As Bill said, the questions would have to be manually separated in most cases.
I created a Data Explorer query to find all the numeric-only tags in the system and the question count for each.
It doesn't look that bad to clean up. Basically go through each one, retag the ones that don't belong to a major group (i.e., .NET), and then get a mod to merge the rest. There aren't very many popular groups in the list, which is nice.
I think each tag can be put into a different tag that's not numeric only, i.e. [8086]
--> [intel-8086]
Just a small notice. This is going to break stuff on [Drupal Answers]. They use numeric-only tags for versions of the software, and this is perfectly fine because the entire site is about Drupal.
Ask Ubuntu also does this: Tags like 12.04 14.04 16.04 all exist on AU.
It is also possible that a similar case exists on another site.
Implied from that, I'm against this proposal.
Magento people are too smart. They prefixed all version tags with magento
so it looks like magento2 instead of 2, which is the way Drupal Answers is currently doing.
faq
. +1.net2.0
tells you something,2.0
tells you nothing.[3]
and[2008]
are invalid tags, but floats get through.42
1.3
and1.8
on SO. Both had only 2 questions attached. For the other tags like 2.0 and so on, there are too much :)