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I was wondering if a policy exists (and if so, what it is) for retagging questions once they have been answered. To illustrate what I mean, I recently answered Draw small cross at the center of the page. It is currently tagged as , perhaps the tag would have been better, but that is not the point I want to make here. The answer I provided (which was accepted) was a pure TikZ answer. Should the tag be added to the question based on the accepted answer?

Additionally, @ThorstenDonig provided an answer using eso-pic which is also perfectly acceptable. So should we also add the tag in this case?

I suppose in part this question is about why are questions tagged a certain way? To make it easier for people with significant knowledge in a certain area to find the questions in order to answer them? Or also for people with a general interest in an area to find the questions? If the former is the case, tagging after a question has been answered has little use, in case of the latter it could still be valuable.

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    I fully support Roelof Spijker view, and also his arguments for why re-tagging also shall be based on the answers.
    – Sveinung
    Jul 8, 2012 at 21:46

2 Answers 2

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In general, tags are supposed to be about questions, not answers. So the tag should be used if the question mentions or implies Tikz, but not if the answers do.

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  • So does this mean the (primary) reason for tagging is to guide people to questions in order to answer them? Or is that too strong a conclusion?
    – Roelof Spijker
    Oct 31, 2011 at 14:55
  • @wh1t3 Tags are there to help people searching the site and also so that it's possible to 'watch' particular topics.
    – Joseph Wright Mod
    Oct 31, 2011 at 15:21
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    Well, the possibility to 'watch' topics was my main motivation for asking this question. My main interest is in TikZ and therefore I subscripte to the tikz-pgf tag. However, some answers are completely relevant to this tag and interesting to me, though the question is not in any way related to TikZ. If not trough retagging the question, is there any other way to make at least these answers appear to the followers of relevant tags? (ctd)
    – Roelof Spijker
    Oct 31, 2011 at 15:39
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    (...) The possibility to tag answers seems interesting to me. I don't know whether this is something that is technically possible or even desired by the rest of the community. I suppose I am mainly interested in the opinion of others and whether or not there is a good way for me to become aware of these kinds of answers without having to sift through all the questions on topics not directly interesting to me.
    – Roelof Spijker
    Oct 31, 2011 at 15:41
  • @wh1t3: I've heard that it is possible to set up a "smart search" that has an RSS feed so that you get automatic notifications. You could set one up for \usepackage{tikz}. (Before you ask, I don't know how to do this, I'm just aware of the possibility.)
    – Andrew Stacey
    Oct 31, 2011 at 19:52
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    @AndrewStacey: I had a look and according to Jeff's answer on this question it isn't possible. However a different answer to the same question suggests feed43 as a service to set this up, which is what I have done. So now I have a feed of the latests posts (questions and answers) that have tikz in the body and aren't closed right here if anybody else is interested.
    – Roelof Spijker
    Oct 31, 2011 at 21:03
  • I'd really love tagging answers
    – MaxNoe
    Aug 7, 2015 at 22:23
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I agree fully with Joseph's answer. Tags are about the question, not the answers.

Questions should be retagged if the OP used the wrong tag, forgot one or it turned out to be a different problem than expected. Like, he got an error while using macro \foobar but it is actually the barbaz package which causes it. Then the question should be tagged for that.

BTW, there are only five tags allowed and there could be, in theory, more than four or five different answers using different techniques. You can't give tags for all answers then. (Not that this is so likely to occur).

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