Merge all plugin-* tags into [plugins]?

Question

In his question Our wooes and future of platform plugins at WPSE Rarst proposed the following at the end:

Extension-specific tags (such as plugin-*) are eradicated. They serve little purpose and send wrong message about what is welcomed. I have seen "there is a tag for it so I am right to ask whatever I want" line of reasoning too many times.

No one answered to that point, Rarst reads that as agreement and I don’t. See our chat discussion.

I am afraid it went by unnoticed and it might have some unwelcome side effects to do that. We will still get WooCommerce/ACF/WP SEO/plugin X questions.

I am asking the community for explicit objections or agreement before we continue making certain tags synonyms for plugins.

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Update: I have removed the tag synonym now. New questions can be tagged woocommerce again, but the old questions (~1k, if I remember that correctly) didn’t get that tag back.

Answer 1

Upon further reflection, I think this tag synonym should be reverted, for two reasons:

1) It prevents the use of the WPSE ignore feature, since ignoring the woocommerce tag forces ignoring of the synonym tag, plugins

2) It is inconsistent. Other Plugins retain their tags, e.g.: plugin-gravity-forms, advanced-custom-fields, and similarly, genesis-theme-framework.

(Note: I also ignore the three listed tags, because like WooCommerce, I don't use them and know nothing about their code; so ignoring them helps me more easily find questions that I might be able to answer. I have lost this ability with woocommerce, since it is now a synonym of plugins.)

Answer 2

I'd suggest it should be very dependent on the nature of the tag and of the questions within. Simply throwing together all the plugin-related tags are going to make questions less browseable. As mentioned by @toscho, plugin-related questions will still be asked. Why not keep the system we already have to keep questions organized (more or less)? If there are questions that are plugin-agnostic, retag appropriately. Otherwise let new content quality rules apply.

Answer 3

I spend bugger-all time on this site, and when I do, I go looking for questions that the experts can't/won't answer because they're outside their specific domains of expertise -- such as Gravity Forms, WooCommerce, and WP e-Commerce -- or because they have a bias against them due to poor treatment from the vendors of those plugins. Right now, I can't easily find the WooCommerce questions to even consider answering them, but I can at least easily browse the other ones.

You might say, "those questions don't belong here", but I'd posit that at least some of them do and hiding them in a huge list of essentially unrelated questions is not going to get those questions answered.

The problem isn't one of taxonomy, it's one of question quality. Too many questions about plugins are poor quality because people think they can get answers about anything to do with WordPress here. That goes back to the site name, IMHO. And of course, the problem now lies with the SE Community Team refusing to change the name to something more appropriate.

I understand the frustration, and can only sympathise. But making it harder to answer questions by removing some useful methods of finding them isn't going to help. People will still ask questions, but they'll go unnoticed.

Just my AUD $0.02 anyway.

Answer 4

I agree with the action being taken; however, I do not believe that the meta discussion constituted a mandate for that action.

99% of the discussion (and answer up-votes) related to the question of scope. While one question (with 2 net upvotes, compared to 10, 9, 8, and 3 net upvotes for the other more highly-voted questions) indicated support for the "suggestions", no discussion in answers or comments even mentioned the suggestion to change tags.

I do not believe that the following justification is in line with accepted SE conventions or moderation:

so what? no one contested either and it was upvoted overall I consider it processed and accepted for action ...or they didn't see anything wrong with it, either way - de facto accepted

Perhaps the bigger problem was that the question was mal-formed. The question should have posed the issue/problem, and then each of the proposed solutions should have been posted as (separate) answers, for proper voting/discussion.

Edited to add: I view a meta question upvote as an indication that the issue/problem/question is one worthy of discussion/consideration, and not necessarily endorsement of a solution proposed in the question.