I was browsing through some of the lesser-used tags and came across many tags that were misused greatly due to either their lack of a description or to a low-quality description.
For example, with the "group" tag, you have a question like "How do I leave an iPhone group conversation from a non-iPhone?", which uses the group tag like this:
"Someone added her to a group conversation...".
And then you have questions like "How to resolve permissions errors on OS X Lion after Homebrew install" which uses "group" like this:
"Unix group..."
And you also have questions like "Utility to group windows for Mac OS X?" which use group like this:
"Is there a utility for Mac OS X that will group windows"
So in these three examples, you have three relatively different uses of the word group. I think that since the "group" tag is very generic and can be used in a multitude of situations, maybe it should be removed and more specific group-related tags created "Unix-group", "chat-group"/"group-conversation", etc. This would remove the ambiguity surrounding some questions with that tag.
Maybe there's a specific reason for allowing tags to be ambiguous that I'm not aware of, but to me it seems like we should either:
- Remove generic tags and create more specific tags that are related ("group" -> "unix-group" + "chat-group").
- Tag more accurately. For example, if I'm asking how to group windows, maybe I don't need to use a tag specifically dictating how I want to manage my windows; maybe I could just use a tag that's a little more general but not too broad like "window-management".
- Write specific descriptions for new tags. This way, if I'm thinking about using the "group" tag, I can read the description and see if it applies to my question.
Again, if there's a specific reason for this tag ambiguity, I'd like to know, but otherwise, I believe that one of my three proposals should be put into place. I'm not saying we don't already do this; on the contrary, we do a very good job at creating relevant tags with good descriptions, but for the future, we should consciously adopt a policy to further improve the quality of our tags.