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is it appropriate to tag a question [ipython]? I understand that the question had to do with ipython, but in-fact it was a question about code listing and verbatim (both tags are there). The specific ipython tag seem to be irrelevant for this website.

So this question has two parts:

  1. Should we remove the ipython tag from that question?
  2. Whats the general approach to over-specification of tags?

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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  1. Remove the tag. It seems silly to tag every listing with the name of the language in the listing.
  2. Remove them?
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  • I agree with this, but will wait to see if there are any counterarguments before doing anything that requires moderator tools.
    – Andrew Stacey
    Dec 22, 2010 at 12:55
  • @andrew overtagging is one reason why we limit users to 5 tags. You should have seen what happened when we allowed 10+ tags..
    – Jeff Atwood
    Dec 22, 2010 at 17:09
  • @Andrew. This seems pretty clear to me, and I don't think needs the mod tools anyway.
    – Joseph Wright Mod
    Dec 22, 2010 at 17:26
  • @Joseph: I was thinking of removing the ipython tag from the tag list. Maybe it will just go away once there are no questions tagged with it, I don't know.
    – Andrew Stacey
    Dec 22, 2010 at 17:28
  • @Andrew: Yes it will become inaccessible for users under 150 rep (or so) and will not be suggested for other users (like the {latex}-tag that was removed that way).
    – Caramdir
    Dec 22, 2010 at 19:04
  • I've now made the change
    – Joseph Wright Mod
    Dec 23, 2010 at 22:56
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In this specific case, it is strange to have without . The general question is, do we want specific programming language tags just for listings? Obviously, languages like C, Lua, R, and Pascal, are relevant here for other reasons, and a code question might be relevant for them.

We could make the tags for some programming languages into synonyms for a generic code markup tag, say . If we did this, it might be nice if we could try to make it so that all code layout questions had one from a limited list of tags.

Postscript

It occurs to me that there is a benefit to having lots of language-specific tags, even if they have only one or two questions falling under them, namely, they are visible and relevant results for SX-wide tag sets, such as python jython. These could conceivably attract many people to the site.

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  • Well, certainly it would make sense for e.g. Haskell -- there is at least one package dedicated to fancy dolled-up Haskell listings, which can be instructed to replace particular Haskell identifiers with whatever you want (typically this would be used to replace a Haskell operator made with an appropriate math symbol which looks somewhat similar, possibly made by squishing the symbols from the ASCII form together).
    – SamB
    Dec 27, 2010 at 22:44
  • @Sam: Oddly enough, we had a qn on squashing Haskell operators: tex.stackexchange.com/questions/4194/…
    – Charles Stewart
    Dec 27, 2010 at 23:18

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