Good Tags now save a lot of work later!

Question

Since you are just setting out with this SE you might appreciate to hear about my learning experience: I've been a moderator on Bitcoin.SE for almost two years now, and I have spent a lot of time on fixing tags there: Tagging can quickly grow rampantly, when not cultivated.
E.g. when I started the clean-up, we had lots of

• meta-tags (describing the type of question instead of the topic), e.g. definition, opinion, comparison
• ambiguous tags, e.g. future, computing, offline
• too broad tags, e.g. mining and transaction are on more than 10% of our questions
• duplicate tags, e.g. jargon, terms, vocabulary, and terminology

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So, even when I'm quoting myself, please consider these ideas to evaluate tags:

What properties do good tags have?

1. Descriptive. Does the tag add valuable information when it is added to a question?
2. Representative. Can the tag be the only tag of a question?
3. Unambiguous. Does the tag commonly mean the same thing for different people?
4. Confined. Does the tag create a specific, well-defined category?
5. Meaningful. Can you see anyone at some point subscribing to the tag or searching for related questions by using the tag?
6. Constrictive. Can you see anyone using this tag to ignore a topic?
7. Unique. Is there a very similar tag that is more popular which could be applied instead?

If a tag's usefulness is contested, think about whether its name or definition could be improved, but finally rather err on allowing it.

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There are already many tags that should be improved or culled now, before they are on dozens of questions:
development, public, data, debugging, status, size, prunning, vr, usability, updates, computations, by, application…
to name a few. Believe me, it's easier to do it now than later.

I'd be happy to help or advise, if you are interested. I'm hanging out in chat, and will be looking at this SE from time to time. :)

Answer 1

Thanks for shareing your experience. I will start looking through the tags right now and list suggestions here.

Unfortunately, there is no member with the merge-tags privilege yet.

Issues identified so far:

• contracts and smartcontract should be synonyms
• smartcontract should be renamed to smart-contracts (discuss)
• statetree should be renamed to state-tree (discuss)
• geth and go-ethereum could be synonyms.
• uncleblocks should be renamed uncle-blocks
• paperwallet should be renamed paper-wallets

Answer 2

Quite a few of the listed tags in my question where already removed, but here are some comments on the remaining:

• development: Since Ethereum is Software, a lot of very different question topics could be tagged development. It's too broad and ambiguous.
  Suggestion: Replace with more specific tags such as contract-design, or specific software names e.g. geth-development.
• data: Ambiguous, is used for different things (state-data, messages, content of data management), doesn't define a clear topic. It always comes back up on Bitcoin as well.
  Suggestion: Probably should be blacklisted.
• debugging: Same problem as development. It doesn't have a clear focus, too specific on the one hand but too broad in another aspect. Suggestion: Perhaps a contract-debugging could make sense if you get many questions along that line, but debugging should be burninated.
• usability: Actually, this one might be alright.
• updates: Updates of contracts, updates of software, updates of websites… Will get used on very different questions, due to appearing in many different contexts.
  Suggestion: Should be burninated.
• ux: Somewhat unspecific context, might get used as a meta-tag.
  Suggestion: Should be retagged to user-experience.
• accounts: Should get a tag wiki if it is a specific construct in Ethereum. Otherwise should be removed because it will be used to label questions about accounts on websites etc.
• architecture: No clear topic. Through it's meaning in Software Development will probably be used on lots of different things.
  Suggestion: Replace with more specific tag that specifies the context of ethereum.
• byblock & by-block → consensus-by-block
• bychain & by-chain → consensus-by-chain
• performance-optimization: When standing by itself doesn't define a clear topic.
• abi: Needs a tag-wiki.

Answer 3

Singular or Plural tags?

we should point out if we want tags in singular or plural. here is a list of tags:

Singular

• dapp ---> rename dapps
• blockchain ok
• wallet ---> rename wallets
• address ---> rename addresses
• network ok
• exchange ---> rename exchanges

Plural

• smart-contracts ok
• transactions ok
• accounts ok
• clients ok
• economics ok
• nodes ok
• forks ok
• repositories ok
• testnets ok

I tend to recommend using plural tags and agree with @murch this does not make any sense for blockchain and network.