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Today I went to writing a few tag wikis as I do every once in a while. I found the tag and suggested an edit. dot_Sp0t had a closer look at the tag and we discussed what to do with it. Basically I will summarize the chat here:

  • is rarely used - a handful of views on the tag (probably me and dot), 3 questions in total, one of them closed
  • seems to be similar to , another small tag with 4 questions, 2 of which are closed, one of them also being tagged with
  • there is a tag whose tag wiki excerpt reads

For questions about sources and types of nutrition for a living organism.

The tag seems to cover what the nutrition and diet tag are meant for. Two of the questions (one of them being the one that is also tagged ) are already tagged with .

The tag wiki reads:

This tag should be used for all questions about sustenance for creatures. This includes natural sources of food, like plants and animals that can be eaten by a given creature, as well as processed food. It also includes the process of acquiring sources of food and processing food.

This tag is often used in conjunction with the biology tag and tags describing the creature or method in question.

Which also shows that this tag should be used for what and aim at.

Getting rid of the two small tags and would affect a total of only 4 questions.

What is the community consensus? Do we need the tags and or can we just go ahead and remove both of them and replace them with food where the questions are not already tagged with ?

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    $\begingroup$ Good catch. Maybe they should be synomymized, given the hugely different spelling? (Synonyms are often used for different words with same or near-same meaning, which substring matching doesn't catch.) $\endgroup$
    – user
    Nov 22, 2017 at 14:33
  • $\begingroup$ @MichaelKjörling That might be a possibility, too, though I don't have the required score on food to suggest any synonyms. BTW: What would happen to the questions tagged for example with food and nutrition when nutrition is made a synonym for food? That would mean two different "tags" of the total maximum five used leading to the same tag. For this question it would even mean three to one if diet is a synonym, too. $\endgroup$
    – Secespitus
    Nov 22, 2017 at 14:40
  • $\begingroup$ I'm pretty sure the system gracefully handles that case by actually combining the tags (effectively causing the synonymized tags to disappear from a question where more than one of them originally appeared, leaving just the one master tag). If there is reasonably community consensus (or at least not too much disagreement) a moderator can certainly synonymize the tags involved. $\endgroup$
    – user
    Nov 22, 2017 at 14:49

1 Answer 1

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In chat, you seem to have done your homework regarding seeing how popular the respective tags were. I'll merge them into food later today if nobody has any arguments against.

Or, given the small usage, don’t bother with synonyms and just let you retag the questions? (the now-unused tags will be deleted in a few days)

The benefit of the synonym is that someone may do it again. Searching the tags for suitable, it may not occur to someone to look for when he’s thinking of those other terms in his question. The search matches the partial tag name only, not the description. So it is not easy to discover that is meant to cover diet and nutrition issues as well, and most people won’t know that a broad term is used intentionally because it has a small number of uses.

update

Done.

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