What are the existing problems with current tags?

Question

A recent answer buried what I thought was a very important question that I felt deserved to be brought to the forefront. The author asked:

Instead of making changes to the tags now, why don't we talk about what the existing problems are with the current tags and then come up with a plan that takes into account Stack Exchange policy and the mistakes of the past (so we don't repeat them?)

I think this question needs to be answered before the parent question can be answered properly. Answering this question will also help answer some related questions such as:

• Why does our policy on pm-tools appear inconsistent?
• What's the difference between the tools tag and the pm-software tag?
• Should we allow tags of specific PM tools?
• Is the question we fixed on topic or off topic? What are the boundaries of PMSE?

Answer 1

I think we should start by listing tags that we should eliminate. Clearing these tags first will then help us focus on the tags that are worth keeping but that are misused and in need of more guidance on how to use them.

To start, here are some tags that I've had concerns about for some time:

• common-project-problems

It seems difficult to differentiate a common problem from an uncommon problem. What makes a problem a common problem? Who judges this? Also, most questions should be about some kind of problem whether common or not. Thus, this seems a bit unnecessary and more like a meta tag.

best-practices

Jeff uses this as an example meta-tag in The Death of Meta Tags. I'm not exactly sure when to use this tag, which is one of the ways to tell if a tag is a meta tag.

recommendation

We've concluded as a community that Recommendation questions are not constructive, and we've disallowed them in the FAQ. We should look at the questions in this tag, determine their constructiveness, then close them and remove the tag.

• The recommendation tag has been removed. All questions have been retagged as appropriate.

project-manager

I'm not sure if this tag adds value, since just about every single question has something to do with a project manager. I did look at other sites like Webmasters and Programmers SE to see if they had tags that reflect the actual roles of people, and they don't.

books

I'm almost certain we don't need this tag. While offering a link to a book in a really great answer would surely be helpful, a question about books certainly would not.

learning

The purpose of Project Management Stack Exchange is to provide expert answers to questions about project management problems. Learning is baked into everything that we do here; therefore, having a tag specifically geared towards learning is repetitive and redundant. We should go through the questions with this tag and evaluate them individually to determine if they're good Stack Exchange questions, edit the ones that can be fixed, and flag or vote to close the ones that cannot be fixed.

Finally, we should retag the questions to remove this tag from the questions.

methodology

We have tags for Agile, Scrum, and other methodologies, so I'm not sure what this tag gives us exactly. What is the value in this tag?

project-team

We have a team-building and a team-management. Can project-team questions fall in with these tags? Do we need a project-team tag? If so, how is it different from the other two referenced tags? Could this be a synonym of team-management?

pm-models

There is only 1 question with this tag. I retagged as methodology as they appear to be synonyms.

project

There are currently 15 4 questions with this tag.

I'll add more to the list as I come across them.