If you look around the tags section, you will see we have many useless or repetitive tags. Many of these only have 1 question. I suggest we begin to burn some of these as it is foolish to have a futurology tag and a future. That is only 1 example of many that I can bring up.
What does the community have to say about this?
I personally suggest we burninate all tags that have only 1 question for a week or more after their creation. I wanted to run this by some meta users before I took any action.
Burnination is the remedy for widely-used tags that we don't want. It's an alternative to editing it out of all the questions. So that's not what we're looking for here; if there are one or two uses of a tag and that tag needs to go away, just edit the questions.
Infrequently-used is not the same as unneeded; it's possible to have a specialized tag that sees little traffic. I'm not saying that's the case here, just that it's possible.
Tags with only one use and no tag wiki are auto-destroyed after a while (I think six months but I might be wrong about that). The way to preserve a valuable tag that is, or risks becoming, single-use is to write a good tag wiki for it.
I am not surprised that we have redundant tags; every beta goes through an initial burst of tags followed by a rationalization/cleanup of them. Those should be cleaned up. If you know what needs to be done, please just do it -- your edit will bump the question and if others disagree, they can respond. (Please don't do so many at once that your earlier edits -- and other people's new posts -- get buried.) If you're not sure what to do, please bring it to meta.
Thanks for your efforts to improve our tags. Fixing this not only helps organize existing content but makes it clearer where new stuff -- both questions and new tags -- should go.
Yes and no - as Monica says, it's possible to have tags that look useless - only 1 or 2 questions, no tag wiki - but could actually add a lot of value to categorisation of questions.
You're over 2k rep, so you have access to the moderator tools - at the bottom of the page (on the stats tab) is a section for recently-created tags. I tend to watch this and act on new tags as seems to be necessary - if they add no meaning or anything helpful, I remove the tag and let it die. If they seem useful, I might add a tag wiki.
