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How can tags be deleted?

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I started heading into the rabbit-hole of organising tags on the mathematics site, and there are some which are obvious typos and have no questions associated (because the questions have been retagged to the correct spelling). In the interests of tidiness it would be nice to delete them, but even though I'm a site mod I don't see any way to do this.

Is the only route to delete tags currently to flag them here for a member of staff to deal with?

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+6
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This is a gap we need to address, yes. There's another way to get rid of them that's a little hacky: you can merge the bad tag into another one. If there's an obvious target (like there were two tags for the same thing but one was misspelled) I would merge into the correct one. If there's no obvious target and you're just trying to nuke a tag, you'll need to pick some target -- be sure there are no posts currently using that tag first.

When you merge tags, it affects the post history for posts that originally used the now-dead tag. This can be confusing if a post was tagged one way, you fixed the tag, and there are comments about the original tag. Ideally tag history would be visible in the way that post history is, but it's not, or at least not yet.

In the merge interface, pay attention to source and target. I don't remember for sure, but I think the interface on SE approaches it from the other side. Here, you go to the tag you want to keep and choose what to merge into it; I think over there you go to the tag you want to get rid of and choose what to merge it into. If you are or were a mod there, this might catch you the first time.

Update: We've added the ability for administrators to delete tags. (It touches a few things in the database, so it's restricted for now.) If you don't want to use the merge trick, ask one of us for help (or ask a support question on your community's meta and we'll see it).

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Just do it like SE? (4 comments)
Workaround (2 comments)

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