Tagging
Tagging is an important feature of Stack Exchange for several reasons.
- Tags help searching.
- Tags are used to select "Related" questions for the site bar.
- Tags help disambiguate titles in question lists.
- Tags allow users to filter what they see.
The last point is probably the most relevant: experts of an area may not even see a question just because it is badly tagged.
Unfortunately, new users almost always tag their questions badly because they don't know the right keywords and/or are not familiar with the tag space or the platform. We have to help them out.
Everyone who can edit posts can edit tags, too. Here are some guidelines as to what represents good tagging.
Category tags
This is not a feature of the platform, but we have some broad tags that describe roughly where in CS the question lies. Examples are algorithms, complexity-theory, computer-networks and programming-languages.
Rule of thumb: Every question should have at least one category (or at least frequent) tag.
- Classification tags
Once you established the broad category, go into detail. Is your question about algorithm-analysis or search-algorithms or both? Are the data-structures at hand search-trees or graphs?
Rule of thumb: Every question should have at least two more specific tags.
- New tags
Don't be afraid to create new tags. If they end up being not useful, that is no other questions are tagged similarly, the system will automatically delete the tag.
If, on the other hand, you create an undesired tag or a duplicate, we can delete tags and/or create synonyms so future visitors are more likely to find the appropriate tags.
Rule of thumb: create new tags if you think they may be useful for tagging more questions.
Note: If you think older questions should get the new tag (maybe a once specific enough tag needs more specialisation as more questions appear), please raise the issue here on Meta; retagging lots of questions is an invasive step that should not be taken without discussion.