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When providing an answer to this question, I noticed that we have a variety of tagging methods going on. Some examples I found:

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I agree with this answer that we do need to establish some tagging conventions. This is my third private beta, and what I saw in the other two is that it took a week or so for patterns to emerge. There need to be enough questions (with enough topic "spread") to have something to work with. So I suggest that for now people keep tagging as they are, including emergent retagging as seems appropriate (like the bullying thing I mentioned in a comment), and that in a few days we start looking at patterns.

This is not to say that we shouldn't deal with individual tags that are already coming up; keep doing that. If you see something wonky, raise it on meta, gather some consensus (or objections), and then act. It's easier to retag when there are fewer questions, but it's harder to get the tag set right this early.

In other words, brace for some churn, and let's try to organize the initial set in a week or so.

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Should we come up with tag standards?

The direct answer is yes, absolutely. We do need to curate tags for them to be useful; part of that is making sure our terminology and formatting is consistent. We don't want new users to be confused by tags that all sound very similar and we do want established users to create new tags based on some general standards to avoid duplication and confusion.

Should we be using a common prefix on tags that require them (eg. moderation vs moderator)?

If they are redundant, we should discuss which to prefer, and re-tag accordingly. This has to be handled on a case-by-case basis.

In the case of your example, "moderation" is not the same as "moderator" - one refers to an activity while the other refers to a role. The tag can't effectively be replaced by a tag. The tag clearly refers to the use of moderator privileges or tools for bullying but a tag would be more ambiguous - does it mean one moderator bullying another? Moderators bullying non-moderators? It could even refer to a group of regular users bullying a moderator. I have seen examples of all three circumstances. (In any case, bullying has now been split off as an independent tag.)

Should we keep (or eliminate) the plural version of tags?

I don't think it would be useful to have a general policy with respect to plural vs. singular tags. As long as they're not redundant, I don't see a problem. These tags will start with the same letters, so the existing tag will pop up right away as you type - if a user's still going to make a duplicate tag at that point, no standard we've set on meta will stop them.

I might tend to favor plural forms because tags are by nature used to collect a set of like items, but this wouldn't be appropriate for proper nouns (the programming language gets tagged ; your pet snake gets tagged ). There are also ambiguous cases; could just as easily be because "election" in the latter case could refer to either an election or the process of election.

In short, just use your best judgment. In your example, I think is fine; I'm not sure how is going to be useful either way (plural or singular). "Relationship" is awfully vague.

should we prefer "site" over "community" in tags?

I think this is distinct enough an issue that it deserves to be discussed and voted on separately.

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On the prefixing () there could be a so I would say that in some cases there is a need for using the prefix, even if the only 2 right now are Moderator/moderation and user

Edit:

On the bullying thing, I didn't seem to complete my thought. The question was should we use moderation vs moderator. – Andy

My thoughts:

I am thinking that it could mean two totally different things, but I think that Moderators bullying could fall under and bullying with moderation tools would fall under , or maybe there isn't enough difference to separate the two and we should just use a tag of and then a classifier of or

I think that we should use the term Community instead of site for these synonym tags, leaving the use a little more general and usable.

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  • On the bullying thing, I didn't seem to complete my thought. The question was should we use moderation vs moderator.
    – Andy
    Commented Jul 30, 2014 at 13:43
  • @Andy I edited my answer a little bit
    – Malachi
    Commented Jul 30, 2014 at 13:46
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    This morning I noticed a bullying tag on another question, so I replaced the one instance of moderator-bullying with that. If who's doing the bullying matters, the other tags on the question (and the question itself) will bring that out. This is orthogonal to this meta discussion; just wanted to explain the disappearing tag.
    – Monica Cellio
    Commented Jul 30, 2014 at 15:19
  • I noticed on one of your questions and thought it was a good change, @MonicaCellio.
    – Malachi
    Commented Jul 30, 2014 at 15:24

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