• Some tags are overzealously removed, when the question may yet be re-opened, or has actual value on MO (as opposed to spam or obvious homework questions). This was the original concern voiced by Francois, and possibly related to Gerald Edgar's last comment.

This has been discussed above, and also in a recent thread.

• Re-tagging is bumping questions up to the top of the front page.

My original proposal called for, as Will Jagy remarked, the person casting the final vote to also perform the tag-removal when it is appropriate. Then the rate of the question bumping will be roughly the same as the rate at which poor questions are closed and the rate at which they were asked to begin with, which means that it will not be too obstrusive. But it seems that many people do not share my point of view on this, which I don't begrudge. However, it then leads to the issue that some enthusiastic users would re-tag all of the still visible closed questions en masse (which is, I think, the root cause of the recent disturbance).

So I disagree with the statement

at least until we find good guidelines

Even in the presence of good guidelines, if not all of us are willing to commit to it, this problem may still occur. And I don't have a good solution to that. What we need is to get enough people on the same page that the re-tagging can be made as unobstrusive as possible. Failing that, I have to agree (grudgingly) that this may have been a doomed experiment.

Anyway, my original proposal was for us to remove tags on "obviously inappropriate" (not sure if that was my original wording) questions. I had in mind actually precisely this problem that Francois G. Dorais raised: that it would be a pain if a question is closed then re-opened. Though to be honest I was more worried about the case where the question is so poorly written that it is non-answerable (and hence closed), and was significantly improved after re-writing.

Therefore I've tried to only remove tags from questions that, in my opinion, doesn't stand a chance of being re-opened (though I could be wrong). (As an aside, I've also left alone question closed for reasons such as "being an exact duplicate"; there's nothing wrong with those questions besides someone else having asked it first.)

That said, I'd make a plea still for the removal of tags on closed, "obviously inappropriate" questions. I do find being able to filter out the [tag-removed] tag a nice feature.

I'd like to open the floor for a community discussion on the etiquette of removing tags from closed questions. Is it necessary? Should we have informal guidelines?