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We have a small mess surrounding the tag.

Some of the questions are relating to sound / volume / loudness / audio.

Some are relating to storage and the concept of physical or logical volumes.

We already have well established tags for with about 100 questions and with about 400 questions that could probably serve for either meaning of "volume"

Should we leave the tag as ambiguous or perhaps clean things up and then make it a synonym of one or the other ideas?

4 Answers 4

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13

Since we cannot hinder people from trying to use a volume tag for either one of its meanings, I would propose that we block the tag and thus force the poster to use one the following tags instead:

The choice of words is intended and will make sure that a poster will be suggested either one of these tags when trying to add the tag .

Tag blocking already exists with some plural forms of other tags:

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  • We actually don't block tags in general. At you speaking of a tag synonym perhaps for a specific plural/singular case?
    – bmike Mod
    Dec 14, 2012 at 15:36
  • @bmike Actually, I really did think that plural forms were automatically blocked. Wasn't there a talk about how we needed an exception to allow the iPhone-4s tag?
    – gentmatt
    Dec 14, 2012 at 15:45
  • Check my tag edit on his question. It's all done manually AFAIK. See if you can clean up the two plural tags and tag this with discussions.
    – bmike Mod
    Dec 14, 2012 at 15:56
  • @bmike I can remove the existing plural tags, but I can't create the discussions tag. ("not allowed")
    – gentmatt
    Dec 14, 2012 at 16:09
  • Thanks - when there isn't a guide - empirical evidence is often nice to poke at how things work. Either I have enough reputation to make any tag or diamond moderators can make tags that the system has a soft rule on creation.
    – bmike Mod
    Dec 14, 2012 at 16:11
  • Since this asks to blacklist/block the tag - I'm proposing we implement half of your idea. See my answer...
    – bmike Mod
    Dec 16, 2012 at 19:29
  • OK - I'll start on this in the next few days as time allows (and to avoid flooding the edits to the home page)
    – bmike Mod
    Jan 10, 2013 at 22:33
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Since we don't have an answer clearly deciding which side to pick, I propose a two step process:

  1. Use gentmatt's nice tag name suggestions to clean up the existing questions so that anything tagged with gets edited to have the new tags and so that we have a clean count of which is more popular. We would then have no questions with and can watch things for 30 days (or longer) to see if / when it gets added - based on the fraction of questions in both bins after 30 days - we can decide to make a synonym and point volume at one of the two.

  2. After a few months - we can decide to collapse things down to and to or to not collapse them. Why hold up step #1 if we don't have counts or data to decide on step 2.

Merging all the things too early is hard (possibly impractical and/or impossible) to undo, but I don't see a better suggestion than lengthening the tags.

If anyone has heartburn on these names - now is the time to air it. Once this gets something like 5 more up votes than any other answer or the moderators decide to pull the trigger - we'll get going on retagging things.

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  • I'm not quite sure if I understand your intentions correctly. I would not want to reintroduce the volume tag as you suggest under point "1" - since I expect that unexperienced users will falsely use this tag in the future. I really want to block the tag and thus force the poster to use the tag sound-volume or disk-volume instead.
    – gentmatt
    Dec 17, 2012 at 14:41
  • In point "2", do you mean that you want to remove the 'disk-volume' tag and only use 'filesystem' tag instead? (and only 'audio' instead of 'sound-volume')
    – gentmatt
    Dec 17, 2012 at 14:43
  • Point 2 is we postpone any/all decisions on whether we opt to take further action or opt to leave things as they are. I know you want to block the tag - but I want a proposal that has no blocking in it. We already moderate improper tag usage, blocking is a pain (and not something we can actually do directly) so I wanted people to have an option that can be carried out now with the tools we have today at our disposal.
    – bmike Mod
    Dec 17, 2012 at 14:44
  • My personal opinion is the tags you propose are too small to be useful and would be better served merged into the main topics of audio and filesystem. But without making a change and seeing what we have and what new questions come in once the tags are created, perhaps the data will be otherwise and change my very loosely held opionion on it today. Maybe disk-volume makes sense to have as a standalone tag but not audio (or perhaps the other way around). My opinion is we should clean up now and see what happens before we revisit point 2.
    – bmike Mod
    Dec 17, 2012 at 14:49
  • 2
    Ok, I got that now :). A sound-volume tag is indeed very specific and probably too small to be useful. Then, it is also redundant since we already have the audio tag. Depending on a users vocabulary he/she will think of different tags. I don't expect that a non-techie would think of the word filesystem wherever the term disk-volume is also applicable. Therefore I think it's best to introduce the tags 'disk-volume' and 'sound-volume' and link them to 'audio' and 'filesystem'.
    – gentmatt
    Dec 17, 2012 at 15:04
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I propose that we define in the tag wiki that be for auditory volume. We can then simply move the disk volume tags to . Having a definition in the tag wiki will curb a great deal of mistagging as it does appear when a user is typing in a tag.

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Making it as a synonym will not end the problem as users will just add it without reading what it is for.

I think the only way is to clean the questions up and then burninate the tag

If we do not want to keep checking this tag is empty we will have to get the tag blacklisted.

I think volume is a difficult case as it will be the "obvious" tag to use when the question is written and they won't think of the other possible use.

It depends if we want to keep looking to check or we want to stop any abuse up front.If we are happing to keep checking I would make volume a synonym of audio as I suspect people looking for the filesystem use of volume will take a bit more notice of issues.

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  • Interesting thoughts on the false adding of a tag. I'm sure no matter which we decide, there will always be some problems. If we kill the tag, my feeling is will come back sooner or later. We could always postpone that aspect and deal with it when it arises. My hunch is most people are much faster about cleaning up a wrong tag when it's clearly wrong (without needing moderator oversight/action).
    – bmike Mod
    Dec 13, 2012 at 21:25
  • Having done some work on SO burninations - many users do not read the tag summaries e.g.if the tag says DO NOT USE they will - also common word like volume will be added back.
    – mmmmmm
    Dec 13, 2012 at 21:28

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