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Comments on A way to prohibit creating certain tags.

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A way to prohibit creating certain tags.

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On EE.CO we have some tags that are utterly useless, but people keep on using them, for example voltage.

For non-experts: voltage is one of the main physical quantity used to describe the behavior of any circuit or electrical system.

Such tags become kitchen sinks used to tag questions of all sorts, so there is no benefit to use them to organize questions.

I was thinking whether we would need a new feature like a "forbidden tag" thing, with which mods could define a set of tags that cannot be created (when a user tried to create them, some kind of message would be displayed to warn them). They could appear on the tag list in a different color, with a notice to not use them.

However, I think this behavior could be emulated with existing features.

If we define a tag like do-not-use-this-tag-ever and then create synonyms with all the tags we want to prohibit, the users wouldn't be able to create them and the platform would already point that out.

Do you think this is a sound idea?

A problem I can see is that probably there is a limit on how many tag synonyms can be created (is it a DB limit or a UI limit?).

I've already created tags with 4 synonyms, but in this case we could be dealing with dozens of synonyms (commonly used words used in the field that are too generic to mean anything as tags). Maybe the system is not designed to handle this.

What do you think about the idea?

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posted 9 months ago
9mo ago
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Lorenzo Donati‭
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3 comment threads

Explanation of why the tag is banned (1 comment)
I think we tested with dozens of synonyms but not hundreds. This seems like a workable approach until... (5 comments)
Is voltage really meaningless? (9 comments)
I think we tested with dozens of synonyms but not hundreds. This seems like a workable approach until...
Monica Cellio‭ wrote 9 months ago
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I think we tested with dozens of synonyms but not hundreds. This seems like a workable approach until we can support real blacklists. Do you have a sense of the scale of the problem on EE?

Lorenzo Donati‭ wrote 9 months ago
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Just eyballing the ~5 pages of tags, it seems that there could be no more than 50. I don't count tags that are obvious typos or jokes or trolling (OK, I could get that cock could have been a misspelled clock, but shit has no excuse).

BTW, to avoid problems with the system limitations, we could create more than one "blacklist tag" (2 or 3 should be enough for now), for example (just off the top of my head, we can improve the names) do-not-use--too-generic and do-not-use--ambiguous. Thus the load of the blacklisted tags would be shared between them.

Monica Cellio‭ wrote 9 months ago
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Which site has those tags? We can delete those.

Lorenzo Donati‭ wrote 9 months ago · edited 9 months ago
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Electrical Engineering. There are a bunch of other tags I'd like to delete. I suppose the only way is through staff, because Olin said he can't delete tags.

Moreover there are A LOT of tags that would need some change in capitalization or a change in spelling (maybe a word added), according to that post on EE.meta you also saw and commented on. How should I proceed for that? Are change of case also a "DB-manager-restricted" operation? Should I compile a "general overhaul request" with all the tags to be deleted and all the others whose capitalization is to be changed? Do I post it on meta?

Probably it would make sense to have a privilege to do that and relieve staff members and mods from that janitorial task.

BTW, I still can't create new tags without adding them to an existing question.

Monica Cellio‭ wrote 9 months ago
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Lorenzo Donati‭I apologize for the delay; I was away with limited access and haven't been able to get to this before now. I've deleted those two tags on EE (those seem like no-brainers) and I've asked about deleting -- I thought mods could do that but apparently not, so I'm not sure if that's by design or an oversight. More generally, we want to make tag curation easier but we're not there yet -- sorry! I appreciate all the work you're doing and I hope we can make things easier for you and others doing this important work.

In the short term, posts on EE Meta are the best way to handle this. If there are logical groups (like capitalization changes), you can group those together and someone with the right privileges can do it. Ditto for unused tags that should be deleted -- just give us a list. I'll reply again when I have more info for you. Again, sorry for the hassle, and I hope it's short-term.