How should we tag questions about {subject}?

Question

Straight from #3 on the-7-essential-meta-questions-of-every-beta, can we get a description of tags and actively work to collapse and edit tags before they get out of hand?

The best way to identify tagging problems is to watch new posts closely. When tags become ambiguous, too specific (or not specific enough), or just somehow off, raise those issues in meta, and quickly. Proper tagging is very much a lead-by-example activity. The sooner you get the “community standards” for tagging ironed out, the less chance you’ll have to face the drudgery of cleaning them up later.

I don't have any specific complaints, but wanted to raise this earlier rather than later.

Any specific guidelines for our beta?

Answer 1

Very good, glad you raised this.

As I've said in many places here, our "field" of security is actually made up of several, disparate "sub-fields" that only THINK they're talking the same language.

Thus I think one important tag every question should have, is what subfield it relates to. E.g.:

• Network
• OS
• AppSec
• Risk-management
• Compliance
• (others?)

Secondly, I do see lots of other terms being misused (or perverted altogether), or (apparently) misunderstood and thus duplicated.
Should we start making a list of common mistakes, or ask about a specific {subject} (which btw was the intention of their blogpost...)?

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(As a comment, I think we should start editing tag wikis - but so far I think I'm the only one with enough rep...)

Answer 2

I think we should avoid the 'security' suffix/prefix which we keep seeing posts being tagged with.

For example:

• should login-security be renamed too login ?
• security-audit renamed too audit?
• security-awareness renamed too awareness?

It is kinda overkill telling the tag its about security when your on a security site. Also I think I saw Jeff and Avid discuss something about static analysis is easier to make really good if we dont prefix / suffix the tags like that.

Any thoughts on this? Sorry if this is duplicate or if this should be taken out in a different question.

Answer 3

I think the tag [best-practices] is redundant and should be removed. It doesn't add anything (presumably someone who's answering a question is going to supply what they believe to be a best practice in order to provide a good answer), and could actually be misleading (today's best practices are tomorrow's legacy cruft, and next year's "X considered dangerous" conference abstracts).

(I also find it personally annoying, as it's shorthand for the generic equivalent to "pls give me teh codez" - of course, that's just me...)

A question "what are best practices around X?" can be reworded as "I need to do X, here are my requirements, how do I satisfy them?" and automatically becomes a better question:

• the questioner's assumptions and requirements become explicit
• the answers have to satisfy the requirements, and can't just quote trade-show rhetoric
• did I mention I find the phrase "best practices" annoying?

Answer 4

Meta-tags like "subjective", "best-practices", "beginner" are explicitly discouraged

This blog post that AviD pointed out is worth quoting from: The Death of Meta Tags - Blog – Stack Overflow

How can you tell you’re using a meta-tag? It’s easier than you might think.

• If the tag can’t work as the only tag on a question, it’s probably a meta-tag. Every tag you use should be able to work, more or less, as the only tag on a question. Meta-tags, like [beginner], [subjective], and [best-practices], are useless by themselves — they tell you nothing at all about the content of the question.
• If the tag commonly means different things to different people, it’s probably a meta-tag. In a cruel, ironic twist, the meaning of the tag [subjective] itself … is actually subjective. Ditto for [best-practices] and [beginner]. Best practices to whom? Beginner by what criteria? These tags are impossible to define by anything remotely resembling an objective metric. In comparison, the the meaning of tags like [java], [c#], and [javascript] are crystal clear to all but the nuttiest of nutbags.

Answer 5

We've currently got an "os" tag for operating systems security - the problem is, the questions tend to be about particular operating systems rather than about the general problem of securing an operating system. As a mainly Mac/iOS guy I would much rather see specific tags when the questions relate to specific platforms, and general tags like "os" or "smartphone" used for platform-agnostic questions.

Answer 6

I also think it would be better off not to put every buzzword or technology into the tag. Most questions (at least the better ones) will often be technology-agnostic, even if sometimes there is a specific question of "how do i do this on that technology.

For example, if you're asking how to treat sensitive data on iphones, the same thing would apply to android, windows phone, any other smartphone (or dumb), ipad, maybe even laptops. In short this should be tagged mobile not iphone4.

Tags really should be used for categorization and searching, not as listing keywords or reasking the question tagliciously.