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(A bad pun or play on words in the title of such requests is expected by tradition.)

Remembering I'm not electrified by the existence of the blanket [electrical] and [electricity] tags, let's remove them, or at least blacklist them, of course people have found a new spelling to work around our burnination: , as of now 133 questions, of which 81 have a score of less than 1. (The average question score is 0.826, the average question score on EE.SE is 1.67, so twice as good.)

Can we get rid of that tag? And ideally, really get rid of it, not just blacklist it, as right now, the number of questions that works need work is manageable.

EDIT All questions with retagged. Waiting for SE to blacklist the tag

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  • \$\begingroup\$ The preferred way to handle tags is synonyms, so If you can locate a synonym that we could move the questions to that would be preferable. \$\endgroup\$
    – Voltage Spike Mod
    Oct 27 at 3:42
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    \$\begingroup\$ These are intrinsic tags, and so they carry no information to which I could find a synonym! (@VoltageSpike hence my referral to that older question, where we dealt with two very similar tags, which also we're implicit, i.e., basically any question posted on the site could have been tagged with them. The problem is that this allows people to post questions without any specific tag, which makes them harder to find and mentally categorize) \$\endgroup\$
    – Marcus Müller
    Oct 27 at 10:09
  • \$\begingroup\$ That is true, however most of the time you can find a synonym for most questions. We don't have the 'nuclear' option of deleting the tags, because the CM's say find a synonym. The other option is to clean up the tags continually \$\endgroup\$
    – Voltage Spike Mod
    Oct 27 at 15:35
  • \$\begingroup\$ Started just removing the tag from questions. It's really not been a sensible tag in the ca 25 questions I looked at so far. It doesn't need a synonym, because its meaning is "I think it has something to do with the topic of this website", and that's inherent. \$\endgroup\$
    – Marcus Müller
    Oct 27 at 15:37
  • \$\begingroup\$ Thanks for you help. If you leave the electric-field questions, we could do a synonym with electric field. \$\endgroup\$
    – Voltage Spike Mod
    Oct 27 at 15:41
  • \$\begingroup\$ @VoltageSpike many of the questions do already have the electric-field tag. I'm not just removing them, I always look whether the remaining tags sufficiently describe the question or whether some other tag would be helpful. So far, the majority of the questions were just "superfluously" tagged with electric; Null's cleanup already took care of those that had no other tag at all. \$\endgroup\$
    – Marcus Müller
    Oct 27 at 15:44
  • \$\begingroup\$ @VoltageSpike No, because I've found it's also used on questions about "electric motors". If it's a synonym of "electric-field" then a user who types in "electric motor" as the question's tags will end up with "electric-field" and "motor" on the question (since the space is interpreted as a tag separator). \$\endgroup\$
    – Null Mod
    Oct 27 at 15:44
  • \$\begingroup\$ … and electric lighting, and electric anything, really. Using that tag is kind of a predictor for not wanting or not being able to more precisely tag. For example, the question I'm looking at now is amperage fuses electric volts. Guess what… \$\endgroup\$
    – Marcus Müller
    Oct 27 at 15:45

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I agree. What is doubly bad about this one is that it tends to be mistakenly added when someone is trying to use a tag that has multiple words -- a space between words is interpreted by the system as a tag separator, and we use a "-" to connect words that are part of the same tag. For example, this question was tagged "electric" and "field" rather than .

We can't just make this a synonym of , either, as a user could also try to apply "electric" to, say, "motor".

I've replaced the tag with more appropriate tag(s) on all questions for which it was the only tag so it can also be "burninated" (deleted from all questions) without leaving any questions untagged.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ Thank you very much, especially for the work on the singularly-[electric]-tagged questions! Blocklisting doesn't remove the tag either, it just makes it impossible to use it as tag when posting a new question! (see [electricity], that still exists, but hasn't seen new questions since 2020) \$\endgroup\$
    – Marcus Müller
    Oct 27 at 15:38
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    \$\begingroup\$ @MarcusMüller Yes, you are right, blocklisting it does not by itself delete it from all questions. I've tweaked the wording to be more accurate. \$\endgroup\$
    – Null Mod
    Oct 27 at 15:43
  • \$\begingroup\$ do you have a script to replace electric and field on questions that carry both by electric-field automatically? (and one to delete electric from all questions with motor, [tag:*-motor], shock, energy, power-supply,current, voltage,waveform,grounding, circuits, batteries, field-strength?) \$\endgroup\$
    – Marcus Müller
    Oct 27 at 15:48
  • \$\begingroup\$ @MarcusMüller No. The only way for a regular mod to mass-edit tags is by merging tags and creating synonyms. I could merge/synonymize "field" with "electric-field" (not sure if that would make sense), which would leave "electric" and "field" questions tagged "electric" and "electric-field", and I could temporarily merge/synonymize "electric" with "electric-field". I would need to remove the "electric"/"electric-field" synonym afterward since they shouldn't be synonyms, and we'd need to make sure all questions with "electric" referred to electric fields first. \$\endgroup\$
    – Null Mod
    Oct 27 at 15:54
  • \$\begingroup\$ yeah, that sounds like more work \$\endgroup\$
    – Marcus Müller
    Oct 27 at 15:55
  • \$\begingroup\$ do we have a tag for electric vehicles? encountered multiple automotive electric questions, which describe problems related to electric vehicles. \$\endgroup\$
    – Marcus Müller
    Oct 27 at 15:56
  • \$\begingroup\$ There's an "ev" tag but nothing with "vehicle" in it. \$\endgroup\$
    – Null Mod
    Oct 27 at 15:58
  • \$\begingroup\$ awesome, thanks \$\endgroup\$
    – Marcus Müller
    Oct 27 at 15:59
  • \$\begingroup\$ Can I direct your attention to electronics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9932/… ; much in the vein of this question. \$\endgroup\$
    – Marcus Müller
    Oct 31 at 15:56

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