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Etiquette: Removing tags on closed questions

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    For some time we have taken the habit of removing tags from closed questions. I personally never saw the necessity for that, but I appreciate the effort to keep MO clean. Recently, there have been a few instances where I had to restore deleted tags from reopened questions. Albeit this is a minor annoyance, I wonder if tag removal is perhaps a little too hasty in some cases.

    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?

    • CommentAuthorWill Jagy
    • CommentTimeNov 7th 2010
     
    My impression was that some people use the tags to search for questions that might interest them, I think Willie Wong first asked that the last person to vote to close a question also delete the tags. Maybe we could decide on suitable tags if we reopen a question?
    • CommentAuthorWillieWong
    • CommentTimeNov 7th 2010 edited
     

    Um, yes, mea culpa?

    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.

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    A problem with not removing the tags on closed questions is that when you do a search on a tag there'll be lots of closed threads to sift through -- the software doesn't seem to have a way of ignoring closed threads. For example, at the moment the "calculus" tag has many closed threads in it.

    The problem with not removing the tags on closure is that if we remove them later, the thread will be bumped to the top and spend more time cluttering up the front page. I don't believe the software allows tag changes without getting bumped to the top.
    • CommentAuthorWill Jagy
    • CommentTimeNov 7th 2010
     
    I guess I would ask how often questions get re-opened. Seems to be uncommon and involve discussion, I think under one per day and possibly under one per week.

    I admit that when I asked Willie whether he wanted tags removed from all questions, he gave some informal guidelines he had in mind, and i promptly ignored these. He has repeated something of the sort above.
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    I think it's easier to just add them back in for reopened questions. Reopening is pretty rare, and bumping a just reopened question is probably a good thing anyway.
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    I agree with Noah.

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    Some closed questions I would still like to find by a search of tags. So I thing their removal should not be automatic.
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    Tag removal is becoming a real problem! I would like to urge users to suspend the practice, at least until we find good guidelines.

    • CommentAuthorWillieWong
    • CommentTimeDec 6th 2010 edited
     

    There seems to be two problems:

    • 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.

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