We seem to have a new problem tag that newbies are throwing on a high percentage of posts: help. It's decreasing the signal-to-noise ratio, and I find it annoying, but I'm not sure how to best handle it.
For now, I just remove it on any post I see it on. There's no clear and obvious synonym to merge into, as people are just applying it to any arbitrary post regardless of its content.
What should we do about the help tag? Should I just keep monitoring it manually?
In general, a tag like help would probably be considered a "meta tag": a tag that does not describe the content of the question, but rather some other aspect of the question – such as the author's skill level, the author's motivation for asking it, or what "kind" of question it is (poll, how-to, etc.). We don't need a tag that's just used on all questions to signify "I need help".
If the help tag is being used in this way, the community should make an effort to burninate it (see this FAQ on MSE about burninating tags), if there is consensus from the community to do so. Once it's removed from all questions, it will automatically be removed from the system.
If the tag is successfully burninated, but then a user later recreates the tag, then it may be worth blocking the tag. In this case, it needs to be burninated again; then, the community should make a meta post requesting that the tag be blocked, as detailed in this MSE post: How do we request to have a tag blocked?. If there is a community consensus that the tag should be blocked, then the site moderators can escalate this request to the staff by adding the status-review tag to the meta post.
[help]is an OOB SE tag, is SFSE required to keep all of the "stock" tags? If not, I would vote to delete/disable/hide it.