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As we now have moderators, it's probably a good time to address the 'latex' tag. There are a few questions where this does seem to make sense (such as LaTeX versus ConTeXt versus plain versus ...). However, the general feeling seems to be that the tag shouldn't be used for most questions simply as they are about LaTeX. So do we retain it for those cases or drop it entirely, and if so is there a good replacement for the cases which are about LaTeX in general?

Edit: I wanted to bump this question to raise again the issue of how can we finally get rid of this tag. Me (and probably some others) have been (according to the discussion bellow) slowly fixing latex tagged questions while trying not to flood the front page with these questions. So how should we go about it?

  1. Should we keep doing this micro-edits and try to keep an eye so that new questions are tagged appropriately?

  2. Should we request the feature of a tag kill-switch available to moderators?

  3. Or should we ask for a feature where some edits can be marked as “minor” so that they don't promote questions to the front-page again?

Any thoughts on how to proceed? - Juan

17
  • How about latex-misc or something similar? I also like latex-core that Juan proposed for questions relating to the internals of LaTeX.
    – Caramdir
    Commented Aug 17, 2010 at 15:48
  • 1
    Another question: In the event that LaTeX 3 is released and this site is still around, how will we distinguish between LaTeX2e and LaTeX3? How likely is it that at some point a different macro set (say, ConTeXt) will be more popular than LaTeX and the "by default the question is about LaTeX2e" motto doesn't apply anymore?
    – Caramdir
    Commented Aug 17, 2010 at 15:51
  • I think should deal with 'the way the world is now'! It will take a while (years) for people to adopt LaTeX3 even if/after it is released. The latex3 tag should be okay for this eventuality, at least for a long time to come.
    – Joseph Wright Mod
    Commented Aug 17, 2010 at 17:01
  • We seem to be generally of one mind on this: I may make a start later today.
    – Joseph Wright Mod
    Commented Aug 17, 2010 at 18:24
  • I think all latex-general questions have been retagged, but I can't think of any useful tag for tex.stackexchange.com/questions/301/…
    – Caramdir
    Commented Aug 17, 2010 at 19:01
  • Perhaps exercises or answers? Now, has anyone seen a way to 'kill' a tag without editing every single occurrence separately?
    – Joseph Wright Mod
    Commented Aug 17, 2010 at 19:02
  • Can't mods do that?
    – Caramdir
    Commented Aug 17, 2010 at 19:10
  • I've asked on the mod-only part of SO: apparently only the SO team can delete tags. So it's either a quick request to them or some 'by hand' edits.
    – Joseph Wright Mod
    Commented Aug 17, 2010 at 19:14
  • I'd prefer the request, so that we don't flood the start page.
    – Caramdir
    Commented Aug 17, 2010 at 19:17
  • Agree entirely: now, how do we get the SO people to do this :-)
    – Joseph Wright Mod
    Commented Aug 17, 2010 at 19:47
  • I started to delete the latex tags one by one (occasionally replacing them with latex-general) and after about a dozen edits noticed the "flooding the start page"-effect. I'll stop for now, but will at least look for questions where the latex-general tag is appropriate.
    – lockstep
    Commented Aug 27, 2010 at 11:05
  • Yes, it seems only the SO people can deal with this. The moderators can't do it without the same problem: we will be asking for the 'latex' tag to be removed!
    – Joseph Wright Mod
    Commented Aug 28, 2010 at 5:33
  • How about removing the tag from just a handful of questions each day, preferably spread over the day? So that there is no flooding. If you want, I could do that over the next week.
    – Caramdir
    Commented Aug 28, 2010 at 9:40
  • I think that retagging about half a dozen questions per day should be tolerable. At the moment, there are still 49 questions tagged with LaTeX, and as long as the tag exists, it will be occasionally used for new questions.
    – lockstep
    Commented Aug 28, 2010 at 10:07
  • Just have an administrator (developer?) ban the latex tag, if you're so intent on it not existing...
    – SamB
    Commented Nov 30, 2010 at 0:01

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
5

For a question about LaTeX in general this tag is appropriate, but it seems too natural to choose a [latex] tag for a more specific question as well. We might avoid it by introducing a [latex-general] tag for such general discussions. Its intention is very obvious and [latex] could be dropped.

3
  • 1
    Okay, sounds good. I guess the best plan would be to find the places where such a tag does apply, sort them out then look to remove the latex tag.
    – Joseph Wright Mod
    Commented Aug 17, 2010 at 17:02
  • 1
    I also like this idea very much, drop latex and keep both latex-general and latex-core for the cases when such a tag is needed.
    – Juan A. Navarro
    Commented Aug 17, 2010 at 17:42
  • 2
    This is obviously going to be one for the FAQ! One thing is that I'd prefer latex-kernel for stuff relating to the internals of LaTeX.
    – Joseph Wright Mod
    Commented Aug 17, 2010 at 18:23

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