How did we get all these untagged questions?

Question

There are right now 15 questions with the only tag of untagged, linked here.

Some of these actually had tags at one time.

What happened here?

Please note I'm cleaning some of these up, though I don't have the time to take care of them all today.

Answer 1

To be clear, the policy:

Any tag with only one question in it for an entire six month period, will be automatically culled at the end of that six month period. If this culling results in zero tags, the question will be retagged untagged.

Does every single question really need a unique boardgame tag, no matter how obscure it may be? Isn't plain old search sufficient?

If you feel strongly that a tag is justified, I'd make absolutely sure there are two questions containing that tag in a six-month period -- even by asking another question myself if need be.

15 untagged questions is honestly a tiny amount. And I think the retags Lance performed made the questions much better -- so thank you for that, Lance.

https://boardgames.stackexchange.com/users/96/lance-roberts?tab=activity

e.g.

[untagged] --> [valuation] [classic-games]
[untagged] --> [online] [blogs]
[untagged] --> [recommendations] [board-game-adaptations]

etc, etc.

In that sense, forcing the untagged is actually helping overall quality because it highlights questions that need more than one highly specialized tag.

(You might also look at meta.gaming where they have had similar discussions, and I urged them not to blindly create a tag for every single videogame that has ever been written in the history of recorded time.)

Answer 2

It's obviously true that questions about obscure games are likely to be the only ones populating the associated tag for some time, and are at risk of being orphaned by the clean-up script.

One thing we can do to minimize the impact is ensure that if other tags are valid that they are also added, especially in cases where the non-game-name-tag is really the most relevant. For example, this Hi-Ho-Cherry-O question had a lot of activity lately and is rightly tagged with the game name, but fundamentally it's really a question about probability and needed to be tagged as such to get the attention of the right experts (as it obviously did).

There are a lot of questions that can be tagged this way, and if we're good about it then the impact of losing a game-specific tag will be significantly blunted (after all the point of a tag is to group similar questions and if there's nothing to group the tag adds no value).

Answer 3

I think what happened was that the remove tags with only one question script, removed them and when that left the question with no tags, it added the untagged. We should get that script disabled for this site, since there are MANY games out there that will take a while to build up a population.

I wrote the team on this issue, since there were no moderators responding.

Jeff said that it's a network setting, and the only recourse was to create a second question that used the tag, so that the tag wouldn't disappear.