I guess you have seen a situations where an inexperienced user looks for some tag and when they do not find such tag, they just choose something similarly sounding. (It is very likely that you have stumbled upon something like this if you frequently edit and retag posts.) For example:
- We do not have subgroups tag. So if a user searches for this tag, they might choose some of the tags containing the word subgroup, which are (at the moment) normal-subgroups, maximal-subgroup and subgroup-growth.
- A user asks about Cauchy-Schwarz inequality. They do not find this tag and they choose cauchy-sequence instead.
- Question about ring of fractions or about quotient ring might be tagged quotient-spaces.
- Somebody asking about fiber of a function uses fiber-bundles tag.
I suppose many other examples could be found. (Although I struggle to recall more cases like this from the top of my head.)
In some cases there is not much we can do. There are words, which are ambiguous and if the user does not read the tag-excerpt, they do not learn what is the tag supposed to be used for.
But at least in some cases we could help the situation by creating a tag synonym. For example, questions where the (non-existent) tag subgroups might be appropriate fall under group-theory tag. If we decide, that we do not need separate tag for subgroups, we could still create this tag and immediately create a synonym with group-theory as the master tag. In this way, if someone wants to use the tag subroups, the question will be automatically tagged as group-theory.
- Do you think that creating some tag synonyms similar to the ones described above could help having more questions tagged correctly?
- Do you have more suggestions for possible useful redirects?
Two final remarks:
- This question is not intended for discussion whether some of the already existing tags, which were used in examples above, should be removed.
- I would like also to collect some examples where this could be useful. The question is how to do this - we do not want to have many answers to this posts with examples of tag redirects. I have decided to make a CW-post below. Feel free to add other suggestions there. If some suggestions will need more discussion, we can move the discussion to chat or to a separate thread. It is true that in this way the meaning of upvotes or downvotes will be unclear. But at least from votes on the comments we could maybe infer which of the suggestions have some support and which are opposed by many useres.
