Stack Overflow tagging is... well, it works. Kind of. Sometimes, it just plain sucks. There's a few problems I've noticed, and I think there's low hanging fruit to helping new users (since that's now a thing).

Tag search is terrible


I ran across this problem when we were burninating the order tag. has nothing to do with order. Neither does . Yet search returns both as highly relevant, probably because they have order in them and lots of questions already. There has to be something to be done here, because simple text matching isn't cutting it.

Excerpts and wikis are seldom emphasized and are often omitted in mobile/app UX

Excerpts are important to help people tag stuff properly. They're so important, in fact, we only let highly trusted users (20k+ rep) edit them without a review. Yet, we completely disregard them in some contexts, and never emphasize them enough.

This is what tagging looks like in mobile browsers

mobile tagging

Excerpts? What excerpts? Why is relevant to ? (the tag excerpt and wiki answer that) Not only does this rob people of an important tool to figure out how to tag, we've taken that super privilege and treated it like garbage. Oh, and the tag wiki is now thoroughly hidden, so only experienced users know where to find it (click the tag > click Learn more...). And that assumes you know it exists in the first place.

This information is critical to new users, so why don't we treat it like first class data?

Tags should be linkable

I see this more in SFF.SE, but it's still relevant here. Far too often, someone comes in and picks a subtag. For my [order] burnination, I noted this terrible tagging job (he only tagged it [order] and nothing else), but often people will tag something using a smaller tag (like, say, ), when a larger tag will get them the help they need (using the better watched tag).

What would make sense is to link them. To force one tag to add the other. This could be a gold or silver badge privilege, or moderator, or 20k. The ability to say [X] is really a subset tag of [Y], and ensure it gets the tags it needs would help new users abundantly.

Tags should be able to be made mutually exclusive

In the same vein, sometimes people tag [X] and [Y], when they should never be used together. For instance, this Meta request notes that people keep using to mean . Since we can't easily rename , it would be helpful to say that you cannot use the tag with any of the networking tags (i.e. ). Attempting to do so should disallow submission, with a notice that the tags cannot be used together (maybe directing them to the excerpt or wiki? hint hint).

Tags with off-topic uses should direct users to the appropriate SE site

We have the tag (Now with 100% more asking instructions!). It's got issues. Mostly we close the off-topic ones, and tell them to ask on Webmasters.SE. Which, of course, lots of people do. But why do we insist on making them go through the closure process, when we could tell them up front (better than asking instructions!) about Webmasters? Asking instructions are nice, but, as I noted above, they vanish along with the excerpts in mobile.

Some tags (like ) have whole SE sites for your asking delight, but we can only use excerpts to tell people about them. We've already covered why that fails. Yet SO/SE never makes any serious attempt to tell people about them. I close a lot of SEO questions with a stock reason that mentions Webmasters and I often get the response:

I've never heard of that website! I'll go ask over there

Which means we now get to close and delete their SO question. Which can create other problems. See the vicious cycle here? Let them know up front that they can get help from a whole community and save us all the frustration of moderating the question in the first place.

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    New users? You must mean everyone! Bad tagging is not reserved to new users, I often see 10k+ users making mistakes when they're not following the tags they're asking about. Excerpt visibility is very poor/non-existent on slow internet connections too, since it's loaded asynchronously and gone after you're done typing a tag – Erik A Jul 20 at 8:04
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    AH, how lovely that someone puts into words what I've been grumbling about in my mind for years :-) – Cindy Meister Jul 22 at 14:11
  • Small nitpick: your bold statement isn't really correct; CSS has a lot of crossover with order and border. There is an order CSS property and of course we all know about CSS border properties, too. It makes a lot of sense to propose css when typing in the border tag, though I agree it's probably suggesting order because it's a substring of border. – TylerH Jul 22 at 15:53
  • Tag linking would be great (especially on SFF where we have tag hierarchies), if implemented it would be good to only show the low level tag and the ones it links to automatically show the question on their pages even though the tags aren't on the question. This would free up tag space for other things. – TheLethalCoder Jul 22 at 16:29

A very simple solution for SE would be to force tag wiki excerpts to be shown in the mobile app and on desktop for slow connections (don't load it asynchronously, as @Erik A notes).

Also, one might consider only finding full words in tag searches (find order only, not border)

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    What do you mean by "bios"? – Peter Mortensen Jul 21 at 14:20
  • tag biographies – Alec Alameddine Jul 21 at 16:26
  • We generally call those excerpts (as noted in the OP)... I also don't think we should run the lookup synchronously (not sure we can, considering it is an HTTP request, which is inherently asynchronous). – Heretic Monkey Jul 22 at 15:07

Sadly, the tag suggestion and completion depends on the quality of the tags created. Trying to workaround with the system a bad family of tags would soon run into edge cases, as you've noticed. It would be more efficient if we just got rid of bad tags relationships (synonyms for tags that are either typos or shouldn't exist in the first place) and make more aggressive the tag pruning process.

Stack Overflow have over 57k tags, and I seriously doubt that most of them "sort questions into specific, well-defined categories", as you've already found (what the heck is the use of [border] as a tag?).

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    @CindyMeister I know what's border. But as you've noticed it is many things, and not many of them very useful as a tag. My question is more like what "the heck is the border tag supposed to mean?". – Braiam Jul 22 at 14:11
  • OK. Being a ms-word person as well as a dev, I tend to take things literally. This can all be removed... – Cindy Meister Jul 22 at 14:16

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