Is it better to have more tags or fewer?

Question

I was looking at the tagging of some posts and the editing going on and I wondered what the proper tag philosophy should be more or fewer? And why?

For example one post asking at the word of faith movement was originally tagged:

faith word-of-faith denomination

And it was suggested that he remove the first two faith word-of-faith

I agree with removing the faith tag, since it's not what the primary post was about, but why would we not want to mark the name of the movement?

In the end I tagged the post with: word-of-faith denomination movements. Though I think you could remove the denomination tag since it's really a movement.

So should we tag things with more keywords? Or should it be more limited?

Answer 1

Having some experience with the side effects of prolific tagging on Programmers, I would suggest we start using meaningful tags now and avoid the use of over-tagging: it's a heck of thing to try and clean up after the fact.

If people see that most questions have 3-5 tags, they're going to start adding tags without thinking about what those tags mean or how they're used elsewhere just to make sure their question "looks" like all the others.

I think in these early stages, we're likely going to be able to pull off having 1-3 tags instead of 3-5: many tags mean the same thing, more or less, when it comes to organization, and the really specific tags being added now will likely wind up only having one or two questions in them, making them next to useless. So when in doubt, it's probably better to opt for the more general tag than creating a new tag for whatever the question's talking about.

To that end, I think it's probably good if we nail down a set of 20 "core" tags, get tag wikis in them, and then start to branch out from there.