Guide to tag creation for Ask Fedora categories

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Hey everyone (but especially users with trust level 3 or higher (including mods) — this site previously restricted tag creation to admins (because of the tagging structure intended for most categories). Now, with Ask here as well, I’ve dropped this to TL3+.

When creating tags, please see our discussion at How should we use tags in the Ask Fedora category? From the poll there, most people were in favor of tags of these types:

And then medium support for:

There was also medium support (combining the TL1+ and TL3+ answers) for having a more relaxed approach — allow users with adequate trust levels to create tags, and curate after the fact. My intention is that we take a kind of combined approach — everyone with the ability to add tags in Ask Fedora, please do as you find it appropriate. However, keep the above in mind and tend towards these bigger things rather than narrowing down to specifics.

Tagging for specific application and tools (e.g. firefox, dnf, grub) didn’t get a lot of support in the poll — but those happen to be very popular tags. I’d suggest using a more general tag unless we have reason to believe that that tag will be very useful and popular. Particularly, remember that tags can be thought of as “mailing lists” about a particular subject, so consider if it’d be useful for people to be able to subscribe to or mute a particular tag before creating it.

Note that only admins can put things in tag groups — and only Ask Fedora categories allow ungrouped tags. So, once I complete adding -team suffixes to Project Discussion tags, there should be no risk of disrupting the way tags are used elsewhere.

Also: I do intend to start doing some curation of existing tags to fit the basic model, probably a little bit here and there rather than in bulk.

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Additional FYI: I’ve deleted a number of tags which were used in an ambiguous way — for example, “mirror”, which was used for both repository mirroring and for mirrored displays, and “environment”, which was used for both environment variables and desktop environments.

None of these tags applied to more than half a dozen posts anyway.

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Can we also remove ghost tags?

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Yeah, this is weird side-effect of Discourse’s “tag synonyms” feature. That’s the easiest way to merge tags — it replaces one with the other — but then leaves the original, which _will get remapped if chosen. I can see some cases where that might be really useful (and it does prevent those tags from accidentally getting re-created), but it is also confusing in cases like this. I’ll clean those up.