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I bring your attention to the tag

...what the holy batman is that? It's a meta tag. It describes nothing about the question at all, doesn't help categorize the question, help anyone find the question. It doesn't do anything.

I see it was added a long time ago exactly to be a meta tag, but looking at the questions in the tag, I don't see how it helps anything.

It's no better than having a tag if you ask me...

Can we kill it?

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    Technically there is a distinction between how to questions and other types (such as terminology requests, style identification, etc.), it's just that the majority of questions these days are how-tos. I'm for burning it, but I also see the potential for it being a useful categorization
    – Zach Saucier
    Commented Mar 15, 2017 at 16:49
  • @Zach sure, and that was the justification for creating the tag 6 years ago. I don't see it being of any use now though so I doubt that'll change.
    – Cai
    Commented Mar 15, 2017 at 21:45
  • Yep, that looks like a candidate for burninating. If you all would take a swing at cleaning up around the edges, I'd be happy to make that tag go away. (I see there was a pass last year, so hopefully it won't be too difficult or time-consuming.)
    – Jon Ericson
    Commented Apr 18, 2018 at 23:23
  • @JonEricson: The only thing there is to do is to tag the questions that have no other tags, but that is easier after burninating (since we then only have to search for [untagged]). In general, this is a tag that is more or less randomly assigned to six hundred questions. There is no reason to expect problematic or badly tagged questions to be more prevalent in this tag.
    – Wrzlprmft Mod
    Commented May 11, 2018 at 17:28
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    @Wrzlprmft: I've removed the tag. Only one untagged question, so cleanup is easy enough.
    – Jon Ericson
    Commented May 12, 2018 at 5:59
  • Woot! Trogdor crushes again! 😃
    – Vincent
    Commented May 12, 2018 at 16:49

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
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Just need the community approval and I will do thy bidding.

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    I'm all for it!
    – Vincent
    Commented Mar 14, 2017 at 14:50
  • Actually, you need a CM for burninating. Also, it may be worth to equip all those questions with proper tags before removing the tag (because you cannot find them afterwards).
    – Wrzlprmft Mod
    Commented Mar 16, 2017 at 8:18
  • kill it with fire! let's furnish the questions with proper tags - I believe many of them won't need any changes
    – Luciano
    Commented Mar 16, 2017 at 13:47
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Update... I've retagged all the questions that were tagged only with so we won't be left with any untagged questions.

Interestingly all but one or two shouldn't have been tagged with it at all and most of the questions were unclear and closed; seems the tag is used a lot as a "I can't be bothered to think of relevant tags so I'll start typing my question and hit the first auto-completed tag that pops up" kinda thing (A lot of the question titles begin with "How to...").

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The one good argument for keeping it was that it gave an easy place to find all tutorial-like questions. Just clicking on the how-to tag would take you to a list of fairly basic tutorial questions.

It described the fact that they are tutorial questions to achieve some small task.

However, we didn't promote it much, so it hasn't served a good purpose thus far and I can see why you want to get rid of it.

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