Recently a moderator (with an 82K rep) went through and edited about 30 old question, deleting tags which he apparently judged to be inappropriately used. While I suppose this is a commendable "cleanup" activity, it "bumps" all of those questions to the front of the "Top Questions" list, obscuring most "real" activity on the board.
Isn't there some way to perform such updates without messing things up for everyone else?
There is, but not in this case. You saw only the fixes that I was unable to do en masse.
Mostly this was for the verbal tag. This was being variously used for gre, speech, deverbal-nouns, verb-phrases, and other sundry things. It was therefore not possible to merge it into any other one tag, as there were too many mappings.
It is, as you see, quite a bad tag, so I got rid of it. It could always return, but probably should not.
Stack Exchange does not support it. It's important for all revisions, even ones made by moderators, to be reviewed by other users.
There are a few existing options for people who aren't interested in reviewing tag edits:
As tchrist said, moderators do have special options for dealing with tags as a whole (deleting or merging a particular tag) but not for making edits to the tags on individual questions.
I don't think it's that bad a thing. If the tagging of the question is changed it may put it into view for people who have a specific interest in a certain field - and thus tag.
Since the favorite tags color the questions differently it is a good thing that after a change in the associated tags the question is bumped to the front page.
