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Who should be able to create new tags?
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?
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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.) ↩︎
The main, temporary problem across the network right now is that most sites are young and all fundamental tags that ough …
9mo ago
Currently, those users that know the least about tag policy are the ones generally creating tags. New users shouldn't b …
9mo ago
Automatically collect new tags for review As Codidact communities grow, I can see a need to transition smoothly from …
9mo ago
3 answers
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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.
The main, temporary problem across the network right now is that most sites are young and all fundamental tags that ought to exist for a given community are not necessarily created yet.
Meaning that a new, well-meaning user who wants to ask a question might find themselves out of suitable tags to use for that question, in case they aren't allowed to create them. If we have no solution to that problem, then we can't really block anyone from creating new tags.
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Automatically collect new tags for review
As Codidact communities grow, I can see a need to transition smoothly from the norms of a "new" site to those with open, wide participation. Initially, people should be trusted to create new tags, but eventually there will be a need to nip them in the bud.
What I envision is a system whereby - rather than directly obstructing tag creation - whenever the first question is asked in a new tag (i.e., the person asking the question is creating a tag, by applying it to the question), the site highlights this fact:
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By offering a filter on the Tags tab for tags with exactly one question. Then everyone can, at a minimum, propose an edit to remove the tag (or maybe fix its spelling or something); curators can just remove it. (The system should also automatically prune tags that have zero questions, unless usage information or a wiki exists; currently, that doesn't appear to happen).
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Possibly, by allowing users with the Curate ability to opt in to notifications about newly-created tags.
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Possibly, by automatically generating a corresponding post in the site's Meta to discuss the proposed tag.
IMO, if sites still get to the point where excessive tag creation is a problem, then we can talk about a separate "Create Tag" ability.
Blacklisting and synonymization
Regardless of the above, we are still going to want the abilities to
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Explicitly list tags that may not be (re-)created (Moderators and perhaps Curators should be able to input these manually, and also have a convenient option to add them when removing a new tag)
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Automatically transform tags into a canonical form (this information could be stored in the same place - i.e., have a mapping from the "bad" tag name to a "canonical" name, and simply omit the latter in order to prevent a tag from being used).
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