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The tag has been subject to many, many discussions, and is the most popular tag on the site, with 97 questions as of the time of this post being written. It's a typical example of a meta tag, and past discussion has indicated that it may not be a useful tag for this site.

Looking at the burninate reasons from Stack Overflow:

Does it describe the contents of the questions to which it is applied? and is it unambiguous?

It's fairly unambiguous, as pros-cons is pretty clear, and it does describe the questions to some extent (it states the type of the question, but that isn't really useful)

Is the concept described even on-topic for the site?

Not on its own, no. The concept of pros and cons is generally applicable to all topics. Simply asking questions about pros and cons instead of pointing to a language-design or language-implementation perspective isn't on topic for PLDI.

Does the tag add any meaningful information to the post?

No. It's also useless in searches and is a likely sign that the question is too broad. It also doesn't help to categorize the question.

Does it mean the same thing in all common contexts?

Probably.

Another problem with the tag is that it cannot work as the only tag on a question, and will potentially be 'an attractive nuisance for people asking pros-and-cons questions who don't put the effort in to add a content-specific tag.'

There has been general community consensus that the tag should be burninated and isn't good for this site. So, I propose that we burninate this tag! (With fire!)

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  • $\begingroup$ Yes. Absolutely. $\endgroup$ Commented Jul 14, 2023 at 2:28
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    $\begingroup$ For reference (as in actually reference so the link can easily be found): here's how the burning process works. $\endgroup$ Commented Jul 14, 2023 at 3:27
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    $\begingroup$ It's worth noting that the large-scale formal process probably doesn't fit this site (we're not big enough to meet the thresholds), but we can still agree a consensus on what to do and re-tag/close/delete/leave alone the relevant questions as appropriate. The tag will be deleted once there are no questions left with it, if that's what happens. $\endgroup$ Commented Jul 14, 2023 at 4:35

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This tag has been burninated. I removed it from about 100 questions and retagged a few along the way.

Incidentally, while I was doing this, I discovered a lot of questions with this tag were also tagged or . I am not sure that these tags are terribly valuable, either, so perhaps another round of burnination is in order. However, past consensus for the former at least appears to be that it’s worth keeping, so that would certainly require a broader discussion.

In any case, please actively remove from any questions it gets re-added to to ensure the tag is automatically deleted. Likewise, if anyone recreates it, remove the tag and link them to this post.

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  • $\begingroup$ @kaya3-supportthestrike You’re right, I meant to say tags. I’ve edited the wording. $\endgroup$ Commented Jul 24, 2023 at 17:22
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For the sake of having an answer: Yes, we should remove this tag. It's not informative, has no possibility of expertise on it, and isn't useful for searching. As the largest tag it's also often the one that goes into the page title in place of more descriptive tags.

We will need to re-tag all its existing questions, and add new tags to any that have only . In most cases this can be just removing the one tag. We will update the tag wiki to say not to use it on new questions in the interim.

The conventional process here would involve also systematically reviewing all its current questions at the same time, but I suggest that we not do this currently as it would only complicate matters and isn't necessary at our scale.

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