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Is there a civil way to say "I know you just changed this tag, but please consider this other way", or is it just understood that tags in a beta site will be kind of fluid sometimes until a particular approach proves itself?

I don't want it to feel like there's a simmering conflict going on with tagging (although from Stack Overflow experience, I know there often is), especially since this is such a new SE site with lots of new tags and tagging approaches being tried out by all of us.

To ground this in reality, I just went through and changed a few "adobe-premiere" and "adobe-after-effects" tags into "premiere" and "affer-effects", which seem unambiguous enough to me.

I've also removed "video" from a few posts, even though they damn well are about video - it just feels like there's sometimes no need to bin the post into A or V, because that's not adding much information about the question itself.

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The appropriate action is to create a discussion here on meta and add a comment to the original question pointing to the meta discussion. That way everyone can weigh in on the discussion and we have something to point to if future conflicts arise.

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  • Yeah, I follow. There were 3 aspects of this that made me flounder a little. First is that it would feel weird for me to create 2 new, nearly identical, meta questions saying "I messed with these tags - here's why" at the same time. Second is that I've created a handful of new tags, and wanted to open up a discussion like this, to make sure it was ordinary in the early days. Third, I found myself on the opposite side of these specific examples than I would usually be, wanting smaller less specific tags, because these will be very common.
    – Clint Torres
    Jul 8, 2011 at 20:19
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The removal of the video tag may not remove anything from a question ... but it does mean it gets through my ignored tag filter. If the question is damn well about video, I'd expect to see it tagged as such!

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  • I totally understand exclusion filters, but don't think it's a good idea to go back through the history of Audio.SE and tag every question as "audio". It may be a little more work, but with the top-used filter sets on Stack Exchange, I'm sure you'll be able to find and use, or in the worst case create, a set of tags for filtering, which nukes everything offensive to you.
    – Clint Torres
    Jul 13, 2011 at 22:12
  • fair point on using filters: and I can see the more granular filter set working better for me over time too (as it does on SO itself).
    – richaux
    Aug 4, 2011 at 9:05
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In general I support these changes -- action is good!

I also think the philosophy under which you were tagging, which is to remove redundancies and extra words, is mostly correct.

However, it's also important to raise these tagging issues on meta so the community can weigh in and have a say on what's going on.

So, by all means, proceed -- but as you see patterns, please do compose small meta posts here to discuss those patterns with the larger community.

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  • Thanks Jeff! "Start the conversation" is step 1 on my list, and I'll err on the side of keeping the meta conversations running.
    – Clint Torres
    Jul 9, 2011 at 16:24

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