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I just added a new tag: <canonical>

The purpose is (hopefully) self-explanatory: to make it easier to find "canonical" questions/answers when linking duplicates or pointing users to best-practice/consensus answers. I've added a few that I deal with frequently; please add to the list.

I'm hoping this tag will also facilitate tag cleanup/adopt-a-tag.

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You don't need a tag for this; the system will automatically identify "canonical" questions based on how often they're linked to from other questions! You can find them here: https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=frequent

Not only is this more democratic than trying to curate a tag, it's more natural - if folks are actually referencing a given post frequently, it'll end up in the list... Even if the people referencing it don't read this meta question or have any other reason to think a list of canonical questions is a good idea.

Per toscho's answer, I've removed the tag.

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  • Yeah; maybe one day, once the signal-to-noise ratio is brought under control, that will be useful.
    – Chip Bennett
    Commented Nov 18, 2013 at 18:32
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I am not so sure about that. That’s a pure meta tag, and it discourages other users from touching a topic tagged with it again.

In our context – WordPress – canonical has a second meaning: wp-includes/canonical.php and related code. This is confusing.

Please remove the tag.

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  • I don't see a solution posed in that post, or the one it links. It merely asserts that meta-tags are problematic, while providing no viable alternative. Choose a different name if need be, but in this case, unless a viable alternative presents itself, I believe a meta-tag is useful and warranted.
    – Chip Bennett
    Commented Oct 31, 2013 at 13:28
  • Point is that it's normally pretty pointless to "compete" with answers like Andreys WP_Query/query_posts, your Walker explanation or my plugin uninstall text. And if someone finds something new, then they will add it anyway hoping to get fed with upvotes that happen when people read the reference-answer. While I agree with the tag name, I don't see the problem of an intellectual/know-how lockout arising.
    – kaiser
    Commented Oct 31, 2013 at 13:40
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While I agree with your idea, I'm not sure if is a fitting name. I understand the problem and already have thought about how to build a list that is not an off site link temple to find those answers more easily to link new questions there in case.

The problem I see is that people can easily add every crap (and adding new tags still has a too low rep limit/boundary) to their question and will surely mess up our list very quickly. And as WP is pretty large and we get lots of questions, this "queue"/list will quickly get a size where we really need to monitor the misuse a lot and need someone who adopts that tag as well.

Just my thoughts & concerns, not a definitive answer.

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