What's with all the closure tags?

Question

^{Let's raise the tagging topic to a new level of meta-ness by talking about tags on meta!}

We have four different tags on meta.SFF which are about question closure:

• closed-questions (81 questions): "For questions about closing questions, or about a specific closed question."

• close-reasons (58 questions): "For use when discussing the principles and reasoning behind closing questions."

• vote-to-close (31 questions): no tag wiki

• closing (7 questions): no tag wiki

What's the difference in meaning and usage, if any, between these four tags? Should they be synonymised or merged together?

Answer 1

Every time I went back to this issue and started to consider merging some of these tags, I stopped short of taking any action even on the least-used tag, closing with 7 questions. Eventually, I realised what was nagging at me: closing is actually the best tag name of the four, which is why I could never quite bring myself to merge it into any of the others.

What are these questions about? They're about closing-questions.

close-reasons doesn't work as a tag for all of them, because not all questions about closure relate to the reasons for closure: e.g. Are too many questions being closed by a moderator alone rather than the community? or Is there a way to undo voting to close a question?

vote-to-close could work as a tag for all these questions (barring the pedantic nitpick that moderators can't vote to close a question, only close it outright), since they're all about when, whether, or why users should vote to close questions. But this is a strange name for a tag anyway, and what really matters is whether a question actually gets closed, not whether it gets one or two votes to close.

Both the answers here propose merging closing and vote-to-close into close-reasons, since all three are used for questions "about closing questions". I agree that these three tags should be merged together, but if they're about closing questions, then let's call the master tag closing-questions!

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I've now merged close-reasons, vote-to-close, and closing into a new tag called closing-questions. I'll leave closed-questions for a bit, since nobody seems to have worked out yet whether its usage differs significantly from the other three, but I may end up merging that one into closing-questions too. Comments on this will be appreciated, of course.

Answer 2

The 2nd pair serve no purpose. I can think of ways to use them as separate terms, but they're only being used the way the first two are.

The first two make sense, per their tag wikis.

close-reasons should be what types of policies we have about closing questions, or which option to select when we vote to close when a question needs closing. Generally forward-thinking, even if inspired by a specific question.

closed-questions should be about questions that are or were closed. Why specifically were they closed, if closing them was correct, if the close reason was correct, if they should be reopened, whatever.

By the looks of it, this seems like it's how the two tags are generally used, anyway. But there's the usual double-tagging and mix ups we get with related tags.

However, we already have specific-question, so I think it'd work just fine to make them all synonyms, and when it's about a question that's already closed or maybe should be, then use the additional tag.