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I'm aware that editing tags en masse is not encouraged. But going back and editing older questions to update the tags seems to be OK. When a new tag is created, what is the current/best practice? Go through old questions which fit the description of the new tag and edit that tag in? Or apply the new tag solely to new questions?

If I/someone who interested in tag comprehensiveness were to edit the older questions, would those edits be beneficial? Frowned upon? Inconsequential? In other words, is a tag intended as a complete compendium of all questions which fit its description?

I'm interested in what people think should happen as well as (generally speaking) what actually does happen.

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    Off the top of my head, I think both things happen: Old questions get retagged en masse (following our don't mess up the front page guidelines), or nobody bothers, depending on who's dealing with it. Sometimes people make other edits to improve the question at the same time, sometimes not.
    – user31178
    Commented Jan 20, 2017 at 22:13
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    I'm seriously considering posting a self-answered meta titled "I've decided to go and retag a bunch of old, crap answer without consulting anyone. Should I do it?"
    – Valorum
    Commented Jan 21, 2017 at 0:35

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Yes, I think old questions should be retagged.

The point of tags is to sort questions into categories and help out people trying to search for questions later. If there are questions that are old but should have the new tag, we should retag them. For example, earlier this year I asked about creating a new tag. It ended up being created, and I went through some old questions and retagged them with . Now if I want to find questions about Tolkien's languages, I just search that tag and they all come up, not just the new ones.

This question has been asked before on main site meta. The consensus was a clear yes, as I explained up there.

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