# Smart automatic mass-retagging

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 . Basically, I'd like to:

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 , and questions which just have appended but are really just math questions would have the tag removed. There are too many questions tagged to go through them individually.

Is this sort of thing possible?

• But does this specific retagging even make sense? – Alex M. Aug 30 '15 at 9:49
• @AlexM. Yes, it does. Hence the positive support. If you want to know what's going on with self-learning, see this answer (with even more positive support). – 6005 Aug 30 '15 at 10:04

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).

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 or and at least one of the following:

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

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 and then all will be well.

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

• If people really want, I could try to write a program to use the SE API to perform the mass retag with ~10 questions spread over a day over a duration of 2 months. – apnorton Jan 9 '15 at 2:15
• After mentioning the above idea to people in the meta Tavern and being told "no" about 5 times in 2 seconds, I think I'll retract that offer. – apnorton Jan 9 '15 at 4:03
• Actually, I think 500 questions is doable by one or two people if they put just a little work in. 10 seconds per question makes that just 2.5 hours total. – 6005 Jan 9 '15 at 13:40
• I agree with @Goos that it is doable, although it is big undertaking. Comparable to the removal of (algebra), where manual retagging of 700 questions took about 5 months. – Martin Sleziak Jan 11 '15 at 18:42