Conventions regarding Tag's

Question

I think its very important to have a good and consistent way of tagging questions, in order to make questions/answers easier to locate in the future. Therefore, I was wondering if we have some conventions or general guidelines on how to approach this problem? If not, should we agree on something?

First of all, there already seems to be a few redundant tags. For example cond-math.stat-mech, since its already covered in cond-mat and statistical-mechanics. Should we clean up redundancies?

How specialized should tags be? This site will contain many highly specialized questions, and I fear that it will be hard to locate good questions/answers if there are 800 questions with only the same generic tags like quantum-field-theory and symmetry.

How many tags are too many/few? Take for example the question "direct sum of anyons?", it has only very generic tags like quantum-mechanics and quantum-computing. But people searching for such a question might benefit from more tags like: cond-mat, math-ph, fractional-statistics (or anyons), quantum-hall-effect and maybe even more specialized, category-theory. Would this be too many tags? Should we have a guideline saying something like: 3 generic tags and 2 specialized?

And finally, since there are only 107 questions, should we go through and tag them all in a better way (if needed)?

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Answer 1

There's a limit of (I believe) five tags, but I don't think it's a good idea to encourage people to use all of them. I think that a question should have at least one specific and one generic tag, and should only use more than two if it fits well within the areas of several tags (which a lot of questions will do).

A related question is whether we want to use arXiv tags, which works really well in MO. But in physics, there are many fewer arXiv tags, and some are like gr-qc, and any specific question tagged this might be tagged better if it was replaced by general-relativity and/or quantum-cosmology.

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Comments

Another related question: http://meta.theoreticalphysics.stackexchange.com/questions/59/is-quantum-mechanics-and-quant-ph-the-same

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