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Tag collision between proposals
If/when we accumulate many proposals, I think we might run into an issue with tags colliding.
For example, suppose someone adds the base
tag to Video Games ask about base building in strategy games. Then, someone creates a Chemistry proposal, and uses the base
tag for questions about solutions with high potential concentrations of hydroxide.
These two tags have nothing to do with each other and only coincidentally share a name. But if questions from either proposal are tagged base
, it will group unrelated questions together.
This will might be even worse if the proposal, say Video Games, is accepted. Presumably all the Video Games questions and tags would be migrated from the incubator to the new video-games.codidact.com. But then the tags would disappear from the incubator, and what happens to the Chemistry questions tagged base
, which are still in the incubator?
What is the plan for dealing with this situation?
2 answers
Definitely a problem
I don't see this as a problem for filtering posts. If I filter by the proposal tag and the clashing tag, then I will only see posts with the clashing tag for that proposal, not the other proposal.
Where I see more of a problem is when people want to add the tag wiki and the wording makes no sense for the other proposal.
Longer term we need a better solution
At some point there may be enough proposals that clashes are common, at which point we might need a sophisticated solution, so I hope people will keep suggesting new ideas.
Workaround for now
For now, with a small number of proposals, hopefully clashes will be rare. Until someone comes up with a better solution, I suggest we use tags as usual where they don't clash, and only use a workaround for those few tags that do clash.
For those that clash, we could prefix the tag name with the proposal name, so we'd have video-games-base
and chemistry-base
. This would allow having 2 separate tag wikis, but would require some manual renaming after migrating the tags to a successful proposal.
Or maybe share the tag description? If a tag has overlap, use sections labeled by proposal. This avoids the cognitive load of mixing in the proposal name only on some tags. When a community launches, people would need to edit the description on the new site but wouldn't need to rename anything.
(Copied from a comment. I'll try to expand when I have a keyboard.)
2 comment threads