Terminate the [terms] tag

Question

I have been going through the questions tagged terms and they mostly seem to be single-word-requests.

There was another question tagged terms, but it was also tagged terminology so terms seemed redundant. There was a phrase-requests question too but overall they seem to just be single-word-requests.

I did try to propose terms as a synonym of single-word-requests, but the system tells me that I can't because of a reverse synonym on term.

Is it fair to remove terms from questions and replace it with single-word-requests, en mass? I'm not sure what terms adds to a question.

Answer 1

I just went through each occurrence of 'term' and 'terms'. I removed the tag, as it was often used redundantly. I did as @Monica Cello suggested, and replaced with 'single-word-requests'. In one or two cases, I substituted 'terminology' for specialized technical questions.

There were a few instances where removal of 'term' or 'terms' resulted in no tag at all. That was remedied by replacement with 'single word request', 'meaning' or similar. The count was 14 instances in all.

Should the 'term'/'terms' tag be deleted by a user with point level authorization? I recall @coding horror said that tags auto-delete themselves from the system if not used for any other questions, within a 24 or 48 hour interval. (I'm uncertain whether that was implemented or proposed though...?)

Answer 2

I would just remove the tag (without replacing with another tag on questions). "Term" is so vague that it doesn't really add anything IMO. (Though, full disclosure, I find our tag set chaotic and overwhelming, such that if I were to ask a question I don't have high hopes that I could correctly tag it amongst all those options.)

The only downside is that just deleting the tag might leave some questions tag-less. Is that a problem? Long-term it is, but if there's a way to view the tag-less questions (I don't know if there is) then they could be cleaned up piecemeal.

Answer 3

I don't see any special distinction with 'terms' and they do seem to be all 'single-word-requests. So yes, a broad replacement of terms with s-w-r is fine.