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A number of tex.stackexchange questions deal with citations and/or bibliographies. Sometimes an answer will be provided that uses the biblatex package although the enquirer has not specifically addressed biblatex. (The latest example of such a question is Is there a BibTeX style that sorts references in reverse chronological order?) Is it permissible to add the tag to such questions?

EDIT: I will (for the most part) follow Jukka Suomela's advice - that is, I will only add the tag to questions where an answer involving biblatex became the accepted one. I have retroactively retagged the following questions:

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  • Honestly I don't think these should have been retagged, especially the first one, which is specifically about natbib.
    – Alan Munn
    Commented Feb 24, 2013 at 19:53
  • @AlanMunn With hindsight, Ulrike Fischer's (accepted) answer should have been a comment, and the question shouldn't have been retagged because of that.
    – lockstep
    Commented Feb 24, 2013 at 20:01

2 Answers 2

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I would hate it if someone edited my question like that. It's like adding insult to injury: first someone gives the "wrong" answer and then because of that someone else edits my question and adds the "wrong" tags.

It might be ok to edit tags so that they reflect the packages in the answer that was accepted, but even in that case I'd recommend that you just leave a comment and suggest that OP might want to edit the tags accordingly.

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  • I agree that only "quality" answers could possibly excuse a retag - I'm thinking of answers that have either been accepted or received at least a number of upvotes (3 to 10). As for appeals to the OP: What if he/she doesn't visit the site again after his/her question has been answered?
    – lockstep
    Commented Oct 23, 2010 at 20:23
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    Upvotes don't tell if it is the right answer for the OP.
    – Jukka Suomela
    Commented Oct 23, 2010 at 22:27
  • But if it is the right answer for someone else, retagging will make the answer easier to discover.
    – lockstep
    Commented Oct 24, 2010 at 0:08
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    This is a Q&A site that tries to provide answers to those questions that have been asked, not a general-purpose wiki that tries to gather all kinds of tricks that might help someone else. Tags are part of the question. And we should never play games like "I'll edit the question slightly so that my answer will certainly look correct, even though I'm not sure if this is really what the OP wanted". If you want to make answers easier to find and organise, perhaps you could suggest SE developers that it would be good to have additional tags for answers, too?
    – Jukka Suomela
    Commented Oct 24, 2010 at 12:43
  • I think it is somewhat confusing to add a tag based on what the answer is. It makes it look like the person knew what the package was, before they asked the question. I think it would be more helpful to have 'resolved' tag (or something like that) so that it can be observed what tags were used for the question, and what were used to answer that question.
    – celenius
    Commented Feb 9, 2011 at 20:18
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We've discussed this before in Meta:

What's the policy on retagging questions based on answers?

The conclusion there is that tags should be based on questions, not answers, so I don't think that adding the biblatex tag to questions that aren't specifically about biblatex is appropriate. People can search for biblatex answers anyway so tagging question based on even the accepted answer shouldn't be necessary.

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