Why is a certain reputation needed to create new tags?

Question

In Long brackets in flalign the question was raised as a side note, why a certain reputation is needed to create new Tags:

On the side note: how come this whole "reputation" does not allow me to make new tags? Aren't they suppose to, you know, HELP people?

I can imagine some reasons why it is handled like this, for example to prevent getting a huge load of quite similar tags which would divide the tagging scheme into small samples. On the other hand even new tags that are not used by enough other questions within a certain time span are automatically removed. So there is already some autocleaning mechanism that should prevent too much division.

Answer 1

The reason is that we want to prevent people from creating tags that are considered inappropriate. The site has quite a strict policy on existing tags so that the tags have some structure. New members are often not aware of this which causes the system to "break".

If you don't know what are the appropriate tags, try to do your best, however be sure that some of the higher-reputation users will retag the question if necessary. And if you think a new tag should be created, just make a comment to your question and again, some high-rep user will spot it, and if the suggestion is good, he will create the tag (maybe after a short discussion in our chat, which you are welcome to join as well).

For more information, see this meta post: Our set of tags