I happened across a question a while ago that was in my area of expertise, but in addition to it was tagged with four other things that looked totally useless: , , , . I edited the post; since it was well-written other than the tags, this involved just removing those four tags.

Then, the user asked me: why did you remove my tags? I realized I don't have a totally clear answer prepared: they just look useless to me, mere visual noise. Here's the answer I ended up giving, copied for your convenience from a comment on that question:

Tags are for helping people with relevant knowledge find your question. Just loading up with a bunch of tags doesn't help, if nobody is following those tags: you don't need an "arguments" expert (does such a thing exist?), you need a "clojure" expert. Most language-related questions don't really need any secondary tags; they're mostly useful if the problem centers around some third-party library or something.

Is this the right approach to take to tagging? Would it be better to just leave the useless-but-harmless tags alone, only removing them if there are other significant edits to make to the body of the post, or what?

If removing them on this post is right, are there any questions where such tags are useful? I could imagine parameter-passing being useful in discussion of implementing compilers or language runtimes or something, but for general use of a language X, I expect X to be the only tag necessary to ask "How do I pass arguments in language X?", so I don't see what value such generic tags add.

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    My inclination is, just leave low-value tags alone, unless they stop you from adding a higher-value tag. Of course, remove incorrect and really useless ones. At a minimum, I would have removed argument, and probably also parameter-passing. Not for being incorrect but for being useless. Remember they are not only for attracting experts, but also for finding, thus I would leave the other two. – Deduplicator Oct 28 '14 at 1:30
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    So you're envisioning some future user typing into Google, or into SO search, "clojure keyword arguments", and if this question is tagged it will be easier for them to find? If so, that makes sense. I'll keep in mind that tags are for the future as much as for the present. – amalloy Oct 28 '14 at 9:37
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    IMO tags should be as much about the correct answer as the question. Just because the OP doesn't know what undefined-behavior is doesn't mean you should leave something uselessly tagged loop or algorithm when that has no bearing on the question; if tags are useful at all for indexing they should be topical. However as others have said, it's rare that a poorly tagged question only needs your help with deleting tags...there must be some other improvement to be done. – HostileFork says dont trust SE Oct 28 '14 at 15:51
  • IMHO, tags should be related to the question and the issue, and therefore, must be updated as soon as the issue is identified. The OP should update tags himself when he's about to accept an answer. It looks like I'm of the type "future user searching Google/SO". Maybe. But IMHO, tags should relate to the issue first (2 tags) then the code mecanism/key components (2 tags) then the language context (for sample code formatting) – Karl Stephen Oct 29 '14 at 22:38
  • <<Just loading up with a bunch of tags doesn't help, if nobody is following those tags>>, I don't think that is the right reason for not adding a certain tag. Nobody may be following the tag but if its still a correct tag, one should have it. – Parag S. Chandakkar Oct 29 '14 at 22:44

At least personally, I don't do tag removals unless I'm already making more significant changes to a post. Since I'm also part of the group of people bashing tag-only edits most of the time (though it's okay if there's really nothing else to change in the post), I figure it's a bit of "practicing what I preach."

As for the tags themselves, my general philosophy is that the tags should reflect the specific question in the post, but not necessarily the post body's contents.

A recent (albeit somewhat extreme case) is this question I edited a week ago. The question is asking why the program continually prompts for user input no matter what is entered, but it was tagged , , and . Although there certainly was a class and methods, the question was asking about that pesky prompt for user input. (On the other hand, if a tag like were there, I'd probably have let that specific tag be)

A more general case I see every so often in the review queues: Suppose someone is writing something with the server side code written in language A, the client side code in language B, and the question itself is about the client side code. Tagging with language B is a given, but if the problem is strictly within the client-side code, the question shouldn't have language A's tag.

These types of tags that we're removing from posts aren't meta tags, but they still don't describe the specific problem. In particular, it wastes the time of people who specialize in those tags, but not the tags related to the actual question, especially if the "correct" tags aren't even there. If you find a post that has these kinds of tags, I'd say go ahead and remove them. If you know some tags that are really relevant to the specific question, add those in as replacements.

Now, as a bit of an aside, you also asked where those specific tags might be useful.

  • A pretty decent example for would be the top question with that tag: How do I parse command line arguments in Bash?

  • seems to be a little bit murkier, but I see a few "pass by reference vs pass by value" type questions among that tag's best questions.

  • For I can imagine a question in a language that supports optional parameters (like say, Ruby), where a new user just happens to be tripping on them and getting compile errors.

  • I wouldn't know about ; judging from the types of questions that have it, it's not an area I would know about.

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    Just as a side note to "I don't do tag removals unless I'm already making more significant changes to a post": if you are doing it correctly, tag updates (removals, etc.) were designed to be done without significant changes to the post. At 10k rep, you can even modify tags inline to encourage this behavior (keeping tags clean and helpful). – Sam Oct 29 '14 at 15:39

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