Generic tag soup?

Question

We seem to have a few generic tags that I think need to be fixed, because they're being abused. Off the top of my head, we have:

• lightning

Used to describe anything that has the word Lightning in it, from Lightning Apps, Lightning Experience, Lightning Design System, Lightning Components, Lightning App Builder, etc. It's essentially worthless, and even more so, potentially dangerous, since it ends up being combined with tags like:

• app

What does this tag mean? It's used as lightningapp, connected-appsapp, app-builderapp, and so on. It's grown in to a catch-all tag and needs to be fixed.

• component

Originally, I think this meant visualforce-component, but since we have the meta-tag lightning, this means we now have visualforcecomponent and lightningcomponent. Those aren't the same thing, and lightning literally appropriated a tag that originally had a different purpose. I say we clean that one up and ban the original so there's no confusion.

I know that we have several other tags that are troublesome, but I think at minimum we need to distinguish between major chunks of functionality, and encouraging tags like component and app to have dual purposes (or more) won't make things easier for those searching for answers or for those that are answering questions in their favorite categories.

What can we do to clean this up?

I know that there was No Lightning Tag, but that was asked three years ago, and hindsight shows that we should never have let it get to this point.

Answer 1

TL;DR
Not sure we have any good options to deal with these tags.

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We have dealt with overused tag problems before, but the solution we employed in that circumstance may not be an option here. I doubt these tags fall under the guidelines that would allow us to use our most potent defense, marking them as intrinsic to this exchange.

I have been keeping an eye on these tags and others. There are a few options moderators and high rep users (yourself included) can take.

1. Propose a tag synonym
   • Moderator or any user with at least 2,500 reputation
2. Moderators can additionally merge tags, which removes the old tag from questions which still have it applied.
   • This step can only be taken by a Moderator.
   • This operation does not change the last modified date on re-tagged questions.
   • The problem is, many of these tags are so generic that it's impossible to merge them into any one target or set comprehensible synonyms.
   • It would be ill advised, for example, to simply merge the [lightning] tag into [lightning-components], because only 1541 out of 2802 questions share these tags.
3. Burninate
   • Any user can edit posts to remove tags.
   • No review queue is required for users with at least 2,000 reputation.
   • This process involves removing the tag from any posts to which it is applied.
   • New tags must often be introduced as a replacement or supplement.
   • This process should only be carried out in small stages because each edit sends a post to the top of the home page for many users.
4. A tag can be marked as intrinsic to the exchange.
   • Moderators can request that the Community Management team take this step.
   • Last time I requested this step be carried out, the CM team made very sure the tag applied to every question asked on the exchange.
     • That's not currently the case for any of the tags you posted above.
   • Marking a tag as intrinsic kills it, removes it from all posts, and makes the tag impossible to re-create.
   • Posts which have only the intrinsic tag have [untagged] applied instead.

Answer 2

I would suggest the [component] tag be renamed to [visualforce-component] since I also believe that reflects the tag's original usage.

I agree with @sfdcfox that [app] has many contexts, another one of which would also include [app-exchange]. I'm thinking that perhaps it should simply be removed and questions retagged with: [app-exchange], [connected-app], [lightning-app], [app-builder], etc. as appropriate. I believe at least some of those are already in place and we can easily create them if they aren't.

Since lightning is part of the "Lightning Experience", it seems we could merge the two tags by using [LEX] as the synonym for [lightning] with [LEX] being the one that's retained. At least, I think that's how it could work. :)

It seems to me that those simple steps could potentially reduce a lot of redundancy without a huge amount of complexity or burden on SE.