Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Q&A

Welcome to Codidact Meta!

Codidact Meta is the meta-discussion site for the Codidact community network and the Codidact software. Whether you have bug reports or feature requests, support questions or rule discussions that touch the whole network – this is the site for you.

Comments on Who should be able to create new tags?

Parent

Who should be able to create new tags?

+3
−0

It's been pointed out in a few places that, so long as creating tags is much easier than managing them, we're going to have problems handling typos, duplicates, and tags that otherwise ought not exist. There's a separate question about the maintenance side; my question here is: what should determine who can create tags through the post editor? Should we make a new Create Tags ability? Tie tag creation to an existing ability (Edit Posts?)?[1] Somehow require new tags to be reviewed before being applied? Something else?

We want to make it as easy as possible for communities to create and manage their own infrastructure so you don't need to ask moderators to do everything. We also want to have some guardrails so that users who haven't yet learned the community's norms don't do things that will require a lot of cleanup. Assume that whatever we do will have some sort of configurable threshold, because communities have different needs -- what should the mechanism be?


  1. Potential wrinkle: "new site mode". In this mode, designed to ease early growth, everybody starts with Participate Everywhere. If that no longer includes tag creation, we'll need to do something here. (Most communities on our network are still in this mode and, now that I'm reminded of it, I think we owe you a meta post that explains the tradeoffs so communities can decide whether to remove it.) ↩︎

History
Why does this post require attention from curators or moderators?
You might want to add some details to your flag.
Why should this post be closed?

1 comment thread

I don't think there's been any problems with this on Stack Overflow, really. It's easy to rename and ... (14 comments)
Post
+3
−1

Currently, those users that know the least about tag policy are the ones generally creating tags. New users shouldn't be allowed to create tags arbitrarily. It takes some experience with the site and the tag policy to create good tags and not make a mess (as has already happened).

Tag creation should therefore be a separate privilege. If you don't have the privilege, you can pick from the list of existing tags when writing a top level post. That would come with a "propose new tag" area. If you try to propose a new tag, you are encouraged to look thru the existing list first, and maybe display a short version of the site tag policy. If you really feel a new tag is needed, you can enter it. Your post then shows up with that tag, but in a different color or something. That goes on a review list, like edits do. Someone with the tag curate privilege can then approve, rename, delete, or otherwise change the tags on your post.

History
Why does this post require attention from curators or moderators?
You might want to add some details to your flag.

1 comment thread

I support the approach, but with two caveats. (1 comment)
I support the approach, but with two caveats.
Lorenzo Donati‭ wrote over 1 year ago

I definitely support this approach. Especially since we on EE.CD almost reached a consensus that tags should not be treated as mere keywords, but they should be used to build a semantic structure (synonyms and parent tags are instrumental to that). To have a consistent development of our tag structure we must maintain a certain level of control also on tag creation, otherwise it could go haywire.

Two caveats, though:

(1) I'm not sure that every community can benefit from this semantic approach. I tend to think so, but I didn't think it through sufficiently enough.

(2) The mechanism you propose should be optional, so that communities that don't want/need that level of control could dispense with it.