Please kill some meta tags [closed]

Question

A number of meta tags are still present on Stack Overflow. A previous thread identified some (especially Aarobot's answer). Please kill them.

• examples
• learning
• mistakes, common-mistakes
• coding-practices, patterns-and-practices, programming-practices (seems like a lost fight… What's next? just-let-me-tag-practices-already?)
• selfanswer
• skills, skill-set

Some tags are likely to indicate bad questions. Before the tags are killed, or maybe even instead of banning them, their questions should be reviewed for closing.

• developer and other tags containing developer, but be careful, there are also names of development tools in there.
• programmer, programmers, junior-programmer, programmer-related, programmer-skills, programming-related, programming-skills, programmer-efficiency, people-skills
• rant
• recommendation, recommendations, recommend, product-recommendation, libraryrecommendation

A few tags may be grandfathered in but should at least be banned for new questions.

• fun
• puzzle
• tips-and-tricks

A few I'm not sure of:

• calculate, calculation, computation, computational, computing: seems a jumble of uselessness and computational-foo missing its hyphen.
• meta, metatag, meta-tags? the HTML meta use is legitimate, but they're getting a lot of misuse.
• real? gets some misuse for real-time, mathematical real numbers, floating point numbers (which are admittedly called “real” many some programming languages), x86 real mode, RealPlayer, real estate(!)…
• related? (does it have a legitimate technical use in some programming community?)

Answer 1

The following are burninated:

• examples
• learning
• selfanswer
• skills, skill-set
• mistakes
• coding-practices, patterns-and-practices, programming-practices

I'm not so sure about common-mistakes as I think that with some discipline that one might be salvageable. It has a kinda-sorta-approved analog in hidden-features.

Answer 2

rant is off-topic and useless everywhere: if the question is a rant, it needs to die. Ironically, there is a Ruby library named Rant and questions about such would be on-topic on Stack Overflow. There are several questions tagged rant but are really just implementation questions by a frustrated user. They could safely be retagged (and, optionally cleaned up) and be fine on Stack Overflow.

The recommendation series of tags seem to be mainly people asking for shopping recommendations: what book should they buy, what language should they use, what IDE should they use, etc. Shopping recommendations are off-topic pretty much everywhere and should just be closed unless they are one of a few historical questions. There are a few questions in those tags that aren't recommendations at all (likely tagged by someone being brainless when tagging) that should be retagged and kept on Stack Overflow barring justification that they are really off-topic there.

people-skills would likely be on-topic on one of the several Area 51 proposals dealing with people, people skills, and general office-related issues. But they don't exist now and are indeed off-topic on Stack Overflow.

The rest of the tags you point out as possible candidates for migration explain absolutely nothing about the question. They should be killed as meta-tags. There are almost certainly on-topic questions within those tags that were just subject to some mindless tagging.

I also want to note that Programmers.SE, or any other site, should not be part of this effort to clean up tags. The default action, when a question is bad or off-topic, should always, always be to close it. But in a mass retagging, I'm not even sure closure should be part of the equation.

Why? The only time a question should be migrated over to a new site is if the user asking it is going to be better served by the destination audience: that is, it's remarkably suited for the destination site. It requires at least a modicum of special attention to make that determination, and evaluating questions en masse (like, say, during a tag cleanup) makes getting that special attention extremely unlikely and increases the likelihood of a ton of crap being migrated because nobody wants to make the uncomfortable decision to let a question die with dignity.

If there's a relatively recent question that happens to get closed in this project and is really well-suited for any Stack Exchange site, be it Webmasters.SE, Android.SE, DBA.SE or Programmers.SE, it can always be migrated later or can be migrated by a moderator. But that should be the rare exception, not part of the process.

Answer 3

I cleaned up recommend, it was being abused by about a dozen Facebook questions, most of which were about the Open Graph API or the Like button.

I cleaned up half of computing. It turns out that someone synonimized cloud with cloud-computing, which is going to make it hurt for people that don't know to look for tag synonyms when picking tags. Sigh.

Anyway, cloud, parallel, distributed and grid + computing are now all shuffled into their own pre-existing hyphenated blah-computing tags. That took care of about half. The remainder seem to mostly be about "how do I compute X formula" or some variation thereof.

---

I've now completed removing computing.

---

computational is now also burninated. It was being used most frequently to refer to computational complexity, which is covered by complexity (and, irritatingly, computational-complexity, which I'll be fixing in a moment).

---

Starting to clean up real. Most of the questions tagged facebook were about Facebook's Real Time Updates mechanism, now tagged real-time-updates. Most others that were tagged with time are now tagged real-time.

The rest seem to be either talking about the data type or are talking about "real" physical or logical things, as opposed to ... uh ... fake? I'm cleaning up the physical things mentions, but I'm not sure what else can be done to make the data type more clear. There are still about 20 questions, mostly topical.