I've just searched for questions tagged star-trek-tng without being tagged star-trek. There are 79 of them, right now. (Here's where you can find them.) There also star-trek-tos, star-trek-voyager, and star-trek-ds9 questions without star-trek. Should we edit them? Do we actually need that tag on every single ST:TNG question?
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4My opinion is that yes, we should have it on those question.– MithicalFeb 17, 2016 at 13:03
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1If the consensus is with you, then there will be several hundred questions to be retagged, so we should probably organise another tag cleanup event.– Rand al'Thor ModFeb 17, 2016 at 13:12
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5I'm broadly in favour, as long as it's someone else doing the actual work of retagging. Since the numbers are into the hundreds, I'd suggest we ask a programmer to do it rather that actually retagging each question individually.– ValorumFeb 17, 2016 at 13:24
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1@Richard If I do it myself, I'll probably get a silver badge plus a gold badge. It'll only take around an hour. I'll do it!– MithicalFeb 17, 2016 at 13:36
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4@Mithrandir - I was more concerned about the fact that it would absolutely bury the front page– ValorumFeb 17, 2016 at 13:47
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3Related posts: one, two, three, four. It seems the star-trek tag was meant for questions about all ST and the more specific tags for more specific questions, but it hasn't quite worked out that way ...– Rand al'Thor ModFeb 17, 2016 at 13:58
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This problem is more severe - those are the question that mention Star Trek but aren't tagged appropriately. There are 590 such questions; assuming 20% don't actually need it, we're still up to our antennae in retagging work.– GallifreyanMar 6, 2017 at 12:24
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@Gallifreyan - here is a search for those that mention Star Trek and have no sort of st tag on them.– MithicalMar 6, 2017 at 12:31
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2 Answers
After some discussion I'm fine with retagging all star-trek questions with the generic franchise tag. However, I would like it to be a coordinated effort during off peak (ie weekend evening) hours.
It would appear that you have already started changing them, without much discussion or allowing this meta question to receive votes.
answered Feb 17, 2016 at 17:35
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1I did start; the meta question was actually mostly to put the idea of an organized effort out there.– MithicalFeb 17, 2016 at 20:50
There is no way to achieve this retagging automatically.
We could synonymise star-trek-tos, star-trek-tng, etc. with the master star-trek tag, but this wouldn't add the master tag to the old questions with the more specific tags, and it would mean no new questions would be able to have the specific tags.
Alternatively a moderator could merge the specific tags into the master tag, but that would mean losing the specific tags on all the old questions.
Neither of these outcomes is desirable.
The community appears to be against doing it manually.
As @JackBNimble suggested in his answer above, the manual retagging of all questions tagged star-trek-tng etc. without being tagged star-trek would be a massive undertaking which shouldn't be done bit by bit (messing up the front page for weeks or months) but in one coordinated effort.
And the response to this post was resoundingly against having another big manual tag cleanup effort any time soon. Most of those who responded or voted there felt that such a cleanup would cause more problems than it solved.
So it doesn't look as if this retagging is actually going to get done in the near future.
But we can still search easily for Star Trek questions!
One of the main purposes of tags is to aid searchability, and one of the main reasons it's undesirable for not all Star Trek questions to be tagged star-trek is that it makes it hard for people to easily find questions about Star Trek. But in fact we can search for all Star Trek questions, even with the tags in their current state!
Just type [star-trek*] into the search box, and you'll get to this page, which lists every question with every.damn.tag that starts with the words "star-trek". The existence of this search ability eliminates a lot of the practical problems of not having a single unified Star Trek tag (even though I would still like very much to see every ST question tagged with star-trek).
answered Mar 12, 2016 at 16:42
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1Funnily enough, that
[star-trek-*]excludes questions tagged [star-trek] (and not one of the other tags in the list).– MithicalSep 12, 2016 at 20:38 -
3That's because one should use
[star-trek*](note there's no dash before the asterisk).– SQBSep 14, 2016 at 11:03 -
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There's about 1 (one) negative answer on that cleanup post you mention and it has a score of -1 (minus one). Where's the "resounding againstness"? Or did you mean to link to some other question istead?– TARSSep 14, 2016 at 14:13
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@Cahir Hmm, the score of that answer has changed quite a lot since last time I looked.– Rand al'Thor ModSep 14, 2016 at 14:36
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