Contradictory tag wiki entries: {floats}, {tables}, {figures}

Question

Quoting from the respective tag wiki entries:

• floats: "The {floats} tag concerns custom-made floats in addition to those already provided by the TeX macro package you use, and concerns issues such as positioning, labelling, indexing, captioning and listing. Use the {tables} or {figures} tags when asking questions about the standard LaTeX floats."

• tables: "The {tables} tag deals with tabular and array environments and related packages. If your question is about floating or placing, use the {floats} tag instead."

• figures: "This tag is to be applied to floats created with the figure environment, and deals with issues such as positioning, labelling, captioning, indexing and listing of said floats. Similar issues, but with custom defined floats should be tagged with floats."

In other words: The wiki entries for floats and tables contradict each other.

The underlying problem seems to be that we never properly differentiated between floats and the possible content of floats:

• Floats could be categorized into tables, figures and other (custom-built) floats.

• Typical float content would be a tabular environment or a graphics.

Our floats and figures tags are in accord with the float/float content distinction. On the other hand, the tables tag wiki actually describes tabular& friends, and the questions tagged with tables cover this particular float as well as its typical content.

Please suggest measures to get out of this tagging mess. Note that tag badges have been already awarded for tables, but not for floats or figures.

Answer 1

I prefer tags meaning actions or topics resp. objects, such as compiling, printing resp. bibliographies, packages. Naturally, commands and environments often have such descriptive names, this might cause a bit confusion of how to use a tag.

floats, figures and tables are in my opinion tags for such objects, not for those environments (which sound similar, just are singular).

It is not very meaningful to decide between figure and table environments as such. They are both floats with a very small difference. Sticking to environment names for those three tags would lead to merge all three together to floats and to creating a rather content related tag such as tabular-array, we already have content related graphics and the like.

• That's why I would use floats for questions about figure and table environments as such, which means floating and placing and if we didn't have captions, also captioning.

• I keep seeing tables for table objects such as tabular like environments and arrays. Not for the table environment in function as environment. With this intention I had written the tables wiki.

• figures remain for figures, however done, not specifically for floating behavior of the figure environment.

I know it may cause some confusion. A tag wiki must clarify that.

Such posible confusion between topics and environments resp. commands lead me to the questions How to mark environments in tags, Backslash in tags (for specific command tags) and Tags for document classes.

Answer 2

(This is sort of a follow-up on @Stefan' s answer, on which I mostly agree with and which I have accepted.)

Like @Stefan (and in accordance with @Caramdir's "tags about concepts" comment) I think that the way to go is three (general) tags:

• floats, which would cover floating, placing and (together with the respective special tag) captioning of table, figure and custom float environments;

• tables, which would cover tabular & friends (i.e. the content of a table environment);

• One or more tags that would cover graphics, figures, pictures etc. (i.e. the content of a figure environment).

These tags would also correspond to chapters 6, 5 and 10 of the LaTeX Companion: "Mastering Floats", "Tabular Material"; "Graphics Generation and Manipulation".

My suggestion for the tag wiki entry for floats: "The {floats} tag deals with the floating environments figure and table as well as with custom-made floats, and concerns issues such as positioning, labelling, captioning, indexing and listing of said floats. If your question is speficically about formatting a float caption, consider to use the {captions} tag."

I suspect that a multitude of question would have to be retagged to conform with such a wiki entry (and with Stefan's entry for tables, which I deem perfectly appropriate). I'm aware of the problems caused by a "retagging spree" (@Andrew Stacey) and eager for suggestions how to proceed.

Unlike Stefan, I'm not sure that the figures tag will still have major applicability in addition to the tags graphics and pictures. In this regard, I will post a question on meta before long.

Answer 3

All questions formerly tagged figures have been retagged as floats, graphics or whatever else seemed appropriate. This meta question can be tagged as "status-completed".