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After asking a few questions on Math Stack Exchange, I noticed a lack of tags. Tags such as Theorems, various shapes like Trapezoids, or even a tag referring to properties of shapes.

I propose that we should get more specific tags, because it'd be helpful and it would organize the site better.

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    $\begingroup$ 'I propose that we should get a giant batch of tags' — really, what is your proposal exactly? $\endgroup$
    – Grigory M
    Jul 13, 2014 at 18:23
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    $\begingroup$ 'theorems' is a good example of a totally useless tag $\endgroup$
    – Grigory M
    Jul 13, 2014 at 18:25
  • $\begingroup$ @Grigory M Why is that? $\endgroup$
    – user3758041
    Jul 13, 2014 at 18:27
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    $\begingroup$ Useful tags correspond to... areas of expertise, I'd say. So tags like 'group-theory' are useful and tags like 'theorems' (or 'trapezoids') are not. $\endgroup$
    – Grigory M
    Jul 13, 2014 at 19:37
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    $\begingroup$ (And if you want to find questions about trapezoids — why, just use search.) $\endgroup$
    – Grigory M
    Jul 13, 2014 at 19:38
  • $\begingroup$ There's nothing wrong with a tag about trapezoids; I think you're letting your anger about 'theorems' carry over where it's not appropriate. $\endgroup$
    – Brian Rushton
    Jul 13, 2014 at 19:58
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    $\begingroup$ @Brian Of course 'trapezoids' is better than 'theorems', but no, I don't think it would be a good tag. Area of expertise is, say, 'Euclidean geometry' and not 'trapezoids'. $\endgroup$
    – Grigory M
    Jul 13, 2014 at 20:18
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    $\begingroup$ I really don't understand why there's a vote to close this as "unclear." The question is perfectly clear: Should we create a ton of extremely specialized (and broad) tags for questions. To all: Please remember that close votes aren't super-downvotes. $\endgroup$
    – user61527
    Jul 13, 2014 at 21:56
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    $\begingroup$ Moreover, it is a perfectly clear question that we should like other users to refer to when this question arises again. Downvote it if you must to indicate opinion, but closing this question might have the same cyclic result as does humankind forgetting history. If the rare "make more tags" fan understood the massive chore that this community has to go through to regularly clean up the tag list, then they might give adding a new tag a second thought. $\endgroup$
    – J. W. Perry
    Jul 14, 2014 at 1:39
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    $\begingroup$ I have removed (feature-request) tag, since the functionality for this already exists. Any user with sufficient reputation can created new tags. $\endgroup$
    – Martin Sleziak
    Jul 17, 2014 at 7:29

1 Answer 1

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Questions about trapezoids should be tagged with and . That's specific enough: there are only $29 $ questions in the latter tag. Splitting it further into squares, rectangles, rhombi, trapezoids, parallelograms, and irregular quadrilaterals would be more harmful than useful.

Why harmful? Because more tags means more mis-tagging and subsequent re-tagging. When one proposes a new tag, it's easy to imagine it being used to neatly classify questions. The actual use... can be illustrated with a picture: ISS mockup vs reality.

ISS

A randomly chosen question about a trapezoid is more likely to contain the word trapezoid than to be tagged correctly. The text-based search will beat the tag-based search.

And I'd guess there are no users who love trapezoids but hate parallelograms. So the tag would not be useful for filtering.

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