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There should possibly be a tag to represent questions that that relate to functionality added or heavily expanded on in WordPress 3. What should we settle on?

Personally I would go for [wordpress-3] but there is already a [wp3] tag. I'm going to change the current question with [wp3] to [wordpress-3] for now but I wanted to get a broader opinion.

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  • There is no such thing as "WordPress 3".
    – Chip Bennett
    Apr 11, 2011 at 17:06

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We now noticed that having [wordpress-3*] is not workable because it shows up in the autocomplete when people type wordpress. We already blacklisted the normal [wordpress] tag because it is not useful, but the version-specific tags will start popping up even more now.

Because I can imagine (a limited number of) situations where a version tag is useful, I propose we follow the suggestion Rarst gave and create [version-*] tags, and only use them when really needed. Everyone (with 150/500 rep) can help clean up by subscribing to the wildcarded [version-*] tag, and retag when a question is not really tied up to a version. I think we will have fewer mistagged [version-*] than mistagged [wordpress-*] questions, so keeping it under control should be easy.

(I created a new answer so we can vote on it and because the interesting discussion in the comments to a related question might otherwise go hidden. Do you want to follow comments on Meta? Vote for my proposal!)

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    I support this proposal, but I can't emphasize enough how important it is that version tags do not become like weeds, appearing everywhere.. they should only be used when the very nature of the question is intimately tied to a particular version.
    – Jeff Atwood
    Jan 12, 2011 at 7:48
  • +1 Using version-tag instead of wordpress-tag. Great idea!
    – Michal Mau
    Jan 12, 2011 at 23:33
  • @Jeff Atwood can moderators rename tags or it takes someone with higher powers? I suppose these can be changed post by post but it would flood home page, etc.
    – Rarst
    Jan 13, 2011 at 7:17
  • @Rarst: We could rename all [wordpress-*] to [version-*], but we would still need to clean them up once to check on over-use of the tag. And flooding the homepage is not too bad: I did it two days ago with the 23 untagged questions, and at the end of the day almost all of them had disappeared under new questions and answers.
    – Jan Fabry
    Jan 13, 2011 at 7:21
  • @Jan Fabry there are ~275 instances of wordpress-* tags in total, personally I am not in the mood for that many post edits at moment. :) I feel like tags are locked down bit too tight in comparison to posts that are freely editable with rep privileges.
    – Rarst
    Jan 13, 2011 at 8:09
  • @Rarst: What do you mean by "tags are locked down too tight in comparison to posts"? You can do individual re-tagging with only 150 rep vs 1000 to edit a post. Renaming or removing a whole tag is indeed something we cannot do ourselves, but this is something that should be exceptional an discussed in meta anyway - like we are doing now. We could of course remove all [wordpress-*] tags now and only focus on the [untagged] group, but maybe we would lose some information where the version was important? (BTW: If you have a good answer to Mike's Socratic question on this page, please give it!)
    – Jan Fabry
    Jan 13, 2011 at 8:14
  • @Jan Fabry I don't think tag renames/removes are exceptional, especially so for a site in early stage/beta. If you remember when we discussed tag synonyms it was also huge pain with overly tough requirements (by the way we should probably revisit those now that more users have high rep and answers count).
    – Rarst
    Jan 13, 2011 at 8:19
  • @Rarst: Indeed, setting up synonyms was perhaps too restricted. On the other hand, when we were still smaller, the number of questions with wrong tags was also smaller, so more manageable by hand (and it takes some time so see where things go). And SO survived for a long time without any synonym support! Our reputation requirements will change once we "graduate from beta", but that won't happen as long as we don't have enough +200 users. - for some reason, we have a hard time getting there, and thus we stay in beta much longer.
    – Jan Fabry
    Jan 13, 2011 at 8:29
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    @jan we can bulk rename tags, that is very easy
    – Jeff Atwood
    Jan 13, 2011 at 8:47
  • @Jan Fabry @Jeff Atwood I have a feeling of consensus from this discussion, nevertheless there are still almost 300 questions tagged [wordpress-x] What is your decision about this?? I have over 200+ rep now so I could help with the issue somehow but of course I don't feel like going over 300 questions especially when Jeff mentioned there's way to bulk rename them.
    – Michal Mau
    Jan 21, 2011 at 14:56
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I'm going to question the value of this tag. I think we should remove them all since most questions are about v3 and most questions are not tagged with [wordpress-3] or whatever. I think if a tag is likely to apply to more than 25% of questions it starts to be not applicable, especially since many people won't tag their questions as such and there is a limit to the number of tags that can be used.

Tags should be for specifics, not for generalities. At least IMO.

-Mike

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  • Indeed, tags should be for specifics. But I can imagine some cases where they can be useful, like specific bugs for one version, or functionality in upcoming versions that you would like to see in your current version. Maybe the discussion about tagging minor versions of jQuery on Meta Stack Overflow is related. What do you think about this statement: Only use a (major) version tag if the version you're talking about is not the current stable version of WP?
    – Jan Fabry
    Jan 4, 2011 at 9:30
  • @Jan Fabry - I'll answer a question with a question: "Should tags be made obsolete as calendar time passes?"
    – MikeSchinkel
    Jan 4, 2011 at 9:41
  • I think version tag can serve two purposes - indicate something outdated (so version-3 will be strong indicator of old code when we are at current version-5 or something) and indicate something cutting edge (like version-3.1 when we are currently at version-3.0.4). In this regard tags are much like dates - they are not highly important, but they are there for those who want them.
    – Rarst
    Jan 13, 2011 at 8:22
  • @Rarst - But what's cutting edge for 3.1 today will be irrelevant when 3.3 is current. I don't think it's a great idea to use tags that are planned to be obsolete. JMTCW.
    – MikeSchinkel
    Jan 13, 2011 at 8:30
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Yeah, wordpress-3 seems more appropriate.

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    One could also argue that having "wordpress" in a tag name is superfluous, since the whole site is about WordPress. But then the tag would be "3", or "v3", which is maybe too short.
    – Jan Fabry
    Aug 11, 2010 at 20:06
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    I like [v3] more than a [wordpress-anything]. But does it really matter? Version tags do not describe the content (good enough), they are meta tags and should probably be avoided at all. blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags
    – fuxia Mod
    Aug 11, 2010 at 20:19
  • While I agree that wordpress-3 tags should be avoided, they will be used as long as WP3 is new. Likewise, php and php5 or ruby-on-rails and ruby-on-rails-3 tags are currently used on SO, so there's no point in fighting it ;)
    – Ignacio
    Aug 11, 2010 at 20:41
  • @toscho: I don't see version tags as meta tags. If my question is "What should I keep in mind when upgrading to WordPress 3", then a version tag could be descriptive.
    – Jan Fabry
    Aug 11, 2010 at 20:52
  • Likewise, if there's a question about a bug, the version of wordpress is highly relevant. Sure, that should be included in the question, but a master bug hunter might be familiar with one major/minor version and want to filter by it. For that reason, should we also have a wordpress-3-0-1 tag, etc?
    – Bobby Jack
    Aug 18, 2010 at 12:00
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    I don't think we should go that far, though. If a questions relates to a more specific version it should just mention it somewhere.
    – Ignacio
    Aug 18, 2010 at 13:45

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