Smart automatic mass-retagging

Question

Is there some way to automatically mass-retag questions in a strategic manner?

I'm trying to implement a tag suggestion which involves removing the tag self-learning. Basically, I'd like to:

• Retag all questions with self-learning in addition to at least one other soft tag (soft-question, advice, big-list, learning, education, teaching) by replacing self-learning with learning.

• Delete the tag self-learning on all other questions where it appears.

I believe the result would be that, with pretty high accuracy, questions which are actually about the process of self-learning would be newly tagged learning, and questions which just have self-learning appended but are really just math questions would have the tag removed. There are too many questions tagged self-learning to go through them individually.

Is this sort of thing possible?

Answer 1

This is not possible (using usual tools, obviously somebody with db-access could do that). Moderators can merge one tag into another, but that's all, there are no additional options (except for maintaining or not a synonym). Put differently, you could just replace every occurrence (this however is simple).

Answer 2

Ok, so I've posted two really dumb answers to this (deleted... 10k users, please don't look. :P). This one should be better.

This Data Explorer query I just wrote lists all the questions tagged with only self-learning or self-learning and at least one of the following:

• advice
• soft-question
• big-list
• education
• teaching

...and not already tagged with learning (since we want to replace self-learning with learning)

There are 287 such questions. If we retag 10 a day, we can be done in about a month. After that retag, we can delete self-learning and then all will be well.

If we expand the search to also include all self-learning posts that don't have MathJax, then we end up with ~500 questions.