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Some context: Some tags are swamped by wrongly tagged questions. For example the tag. Often this is due to the tag having a name that the average user thinks is related to a different topic. For example the tag seems to be particularly affected, because you can wrongly tag anything related to functionals and calculus as . Many questions on the calculus of variations (which has its own tag ) are wrongly tagged as .

Now a user (such as myself) may want to retag some (or even all) of these questions. This can be done quickly, because the user can just open all the posts in the swamped tag that have a suspect title and then quickly read them and retag them if appropriate. Each time the user retags a question it gets bumped to the "active questions" tab. This makes sense to protect from harmful retagging as discussed here.

The Problem: Since the user can quickly retag questions this causes them to essentially spam the active questions tab with the retagging, which in turn causes other users to get upset and tell the user to cease his retagging activity (totally not speaking from experience).

Now retagging the questions slowly (as proposed here), say 5 at a time, would mean that "cleaning" the tag would take forever. For example cleaning a pretty small tag such as would require retagging hundreds of questions. A certain user already got around 50 of them before his retagging folly came to an end at the behest of other users. Said user has looked through a little less than half of the around 300 questions.

My questions:

  • How can a user (or even multiple users together) retag a large number of old questions to "clean up" a tag that is swamped by (blatantly) wrongly tagged questions while causing the least amount of disruption to other users?
  • Should it even be done?
  • Should it only be done slowly (say 5 questions at a time)?
  • Should it only be done as a collective effort?

In one of the answers in the linked posts Shog9 mentions that retagging should be coordinated on meta, because it "provides a heads-up for moderators, so that they can help out (by merging tags when possible, or by simply retagging along with everyone else)".

  • How could such a retagging be coordinated (on meta)?
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    $\begingroup$ As one of the lists among my saves I have a list called "Retag". When I see a question that needs retagging, I often put it there - either if I am doing something else at the moment or if I have already bumped several posts to the frontpage. $\endgroup$ Commented Jun 15 at 5:42
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    $\begingroup$ I am not sure I agree with your claim that a retagging "can be done quickly". Typically, if I bump a question to the frontpage for any reason (retagging might be one of them), I check whether there is something else that needs edited (non-descriptive title, typos, dead link, mistakes in MathJax etc.) Checking all this in a question and all answers to that question can take some time. $\endgroup$ Commented Jun 15 at 5:45
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    $\begingroup$ @MartinSleziak Thanks for the idea with the saves, i have never used that feature. This at least separates the act of identifying questions that need retagging and doing the edit. To your second comment: The main goal of the retagging edits described in my post is not to improve the questions (although they also get marginally improved), it is merely to remove the wrongfully used tag from the questions taglist. Bumping the questions to the front page is a unwanted and often unfortunate byproduct of the edits. So what you are trying to say is that such edits should not be performed? $\endgroup$ Commented Jun 15 at 8:02
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    $\begingroup$ Perhaps we could discuss this more in the tagging chatroom - so that we do not leave too many comment here. Feel free to ping me if you visit that room. $\endgroup$ Commented Jun 15 at 8:46
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    $\begingroup$ Naturally, in this context one has to mention various long-standing feature requests as: Tool for peer-reviewed no-bump mass retagging and Allow non-bumping minor edits, but review them on /review. On this meta: Is there a way to edit without bumping the question? and other discussions linked there. $\endgroup$ Commented Jun 15 at 9:11
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    $\begingroup$ Stack Overflow manages to do with much bigger tags. Here's a random example of a retag which involved tens of thousands of questions: meta.stackoverflow.com/q/262349/21440243 $\endgroup$ Commented Jun 15 at 19:52
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    $\begingroup$ The word "wrongfully" doesn't mean what you think it means. The word you want is "wrongly". $\endgroup$ Commented Jun 15 at 21:08
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    $\begingroup$ @N.Virgo thanks for the correction. i changed it. I was not aware of the subtle distinction between the two words. $\endgroup$ Commented Jun 16 at 5:14
  • $\begingroup$ The official policy on editing says that you should correct all problems that you observe. Swapping one tag for another can be done quickly. Doing everything like MartinSleziak says should take much longer. $\endgroup$ Commented Jun 19 at 15:04
  • $\begingroup$ @Teepeemm i am not sure the stack overflow policy applies to mse, however mse has a similiar policy here $\endgroup$ Commented Jun 20 at 5:42

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I suppose that some of the things mentioned in the comments could be posted as an answer (or at least a partial answer).

It is worth mentioning various long-standing feature requests as: Tool for peer-reviewed no-bump mass retagging and Allow non-bumping minor edits, but review them on /review. There are also related discussion on this meta: Is there a way to edit without bumping the question? and other discussions linked there.

Until something like that is implemented, we have to take into account the fact that retagging (and all other minor edits) bump the question. One possible way to address this problem could be using saves.

As one of the lists among my saves I have a list called "Retag". When I see a question that needs retagging, I often put it there - either if I am doing something else at the moment or if I have already bumped several posts to the frontpage. In this way, I can avoid bumping too many old questions in a short timespan - and at the same time I do not completely forget the question.

While retagging, one can also check whether or not some old questions have been bumped recently - for example, searching for created:..1y is:q and choosing the active tab shows you recently bumped questions that are at least one year old.question.

Whether the users need to coordinate with each other and how they would do it - that would probably depend on the specific project (and on the preferences of the users who join the project). Some possibilities have already been mentioned in chat. Unfortunately, there isn't an easy way to share your saves with other users at the moment - there is this feature request: Allow setting public visibility settings on saves lists, such as "public" and "unlisted".

I will mention that on of the rooms associated with this site is the tagging chatroom. That could be a reasonable place where to mention problematic posts that need retagging or where to ask on advice what tags to choose for some specific question. (But I have to admit that the room is not frequented by many users.)

I would mention as an example of past retagging effort on this site the removal of the tag . (Essentially, the posts are now typically tagged or . Here are some SEDE queries: Questions which used to have this tag, a similar query showing also the editor.)

In that case, it was discussed on meta whether or not the tag should be replaced by those two tags; after that, basically no coordination between the users helping out with the removal was needed. (Other than perhaps sometimes reminding some overeager users not to bump too many old questions.) See also: The use of the [algebra] tag and Should the algebra tag be blacklisted?

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    $\begingroup$ Several years ago, SciFi.SE had to deal with image links suddenly becoming invalid, and decided to just rip the bandage off and edit them all in a short time. While it might be possible to do such a thing for tagging, it would be important to ensure that we don't just recreate the same problem in a few years after people have asked more badly-tagged questions. That would likely require renaming some of the tags to make them less of an attractive nuisance. $\endgroup$ Commented Jun 23 at 3:04

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