We current have almost 16000 tags. Some of them are typos or duplicates, which I guess makes searches more difficult and might confuse future question askers. Discourse’s tagging UI is arguably better than AskBot and given the large number of tags we already have we don’t have to allow tag creation to just created (TL0) users no? If so, then I assume typos won’t accumulate as much anymore and propose to consolidate existing tags. In the table from post #4 you’ll find all tags for which a counterpart exists with a trailing ‘s’, with topic counts and grouped by categories. The list needs to be reviewed of course, but typically one version is a lot more popular than the other and it seems like a lot of tags can be merged.
If there is interest in that consolidation, I can also provide a list of pairs of tags of Levenshtein distance 1 and 2, but the number of false positives will likely be higher. Either way please save yourself the trouble of merging the tags by hand, this can be scripted :-).
Speaking about tags, Discourse has some features we might find useful:
- Auto-tag questions based on words found in the first post: for instance if the first post is “The border around the cells are of the wrong color.” we could automatically tag the question with ‘border’, ‘cell’ and ‘color’. No complex AI though, only simple word and regexp match.
- Restrict tags by category: some tags only make sense for a single language, and listing them in all categories arguably “pollutes” the tag selection UI. Tags for which every single topic belongs to the same category (language) could be restricted to that category. Given our large pool of tags I don’t think we’ll have too many false positives as long as we don’t add another language.