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The tag is a synonym of , while is its own independent tag.

It seems to me that:

  1. The tag is useless on its own - it does not atomically represent a concrete, independent thing. Tags should not really change in meaning depending on what other tags they are used alongside. There's no value in, for example, searching for recent questions.
  2. The fact that an issue pertains to SP1 of a particular Tridion product is very relevant and can have considerable implications for the validity of answers (e.g. answers making reference to the Import Export Service in 2013-related questions). As such, and are meaningfully different and should not be synonyms.

In essence, the fact that the exists suggests that people feel that it is relevant information to include - which it often is - but on its own it is not useful (what would the tag description say; "This tag refers to service pack one of some unspecified version of Tridion?")

It would be more useful to allow to be used where the question refers to issues and features specific to SP1 and not allowing it at all seems an unnecessary restriction since the fact that a question refers to SP1 is potentially useful when searching and filtering questions.

On other StackExchange sites, similar scenarios are handled well by allowing both tags - in this case and - to be used in conjunction with each other, which provides the ability to search/filter both by the "broader" topic of Tridion 2013 and more specifically-targeted searches for 2013 SP1, while still having each tag be independently meaningful. It is certainly not detrimental and there are plenty of scenarios where it's useful.

So, I propose the following:

  1. Remove the link between and .
  2. Replace combinations of and with (and likewise their 2011 counterparts).
  3. Remove from any remaining questions (as a community editor task).

Thoughts?

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  • I removed the feature request tag from this question as it really doesn't ask for a new feature.
    – Glenn Stevens
    Jul 16, 2014 at 17:07
  • 1
    @GlennStevens - Thanks. Could have sworn I had tagged this as discussion. Kind of ironic really as I'm being fussy over tags.
    – Ant P
    Jul 17, 2014 at 7:53
  • It is a bit of a shame that we don't really seem to attract a lot of opinions from the 1000+ users we have, but looking at the scoring on your question it is +4 and -1, if we look at the scoring of the answers it is 9 votes for bringing the 2013-sp1 tag back and 2 votes for leaving it a synonym. So I guess I'll remove the 2013-sp1 synonym and where appropriate we can retag. I'll remove sp1 from questions, after which it should be deleted in 24 hours we will have to redo that when it is created again...
    – Bart Koopman
    Jul 24, 2014 at 13:27

3 Answers 3

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The existence of just indicates that people don't understand tagging. It's existence is certainly not evidence of its usefulness. We should correct this.

There is room for and to co-exist. means (mostly) "It's about any of the 2013 releases". means - "this question has aspects that pertain specifically to SP1".

You could imagine the most meaningful occasion to use would be where the distinction between 2013 and SP1 was relevant.... an issue introduced with the SP perhaps. But in general if you can use , it probably isn't wrong to also use . If an issue were specific to the GA release, then might make sense.

Of course, this is the most pedantic view of how you should use them. Many people, I suspect, use the tags to preempt the very likely question: "what platform are you on?". Understandable (I've probably done it myself), but not what tags are for. At least, that is, unless we were to create some distinct tags such as .

I'm generally with Ant on this. It's meaningful to distinguish between a GA and its various service packs. (Maybe even Hotfix rollups, but we could decide that at need.) Questions currently tagged as should be re-tagged. And the FAQ should give clear guidance on how this all works.

I can see why you might want synonyms so that if you search for you don't miss items only tagged with ... yes - there's some benefit there, but I think it's outweighed by the usefulness of being able to distinguish between them, especially as you can also use the more generic tag as well (and maybe community members could/would help with that).

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  • Yep - I'd say it's certainly valid to tag with 2013-sp1 as well as 2013 where appropriate in much the same way as the asp.net-mvc and asp.net-mvc-version tags co-exist on StackOverflow, for example. It indicates a version-specific problem but is still easily searchable by those looking for the broader topic.
    – Ant P
    Jul 16, 2014 at 8:08
  • 1
    It is rather unfortunate that we can't create a tag hierarchy, which would allow to have 2013 and a child of that being 2013-sp1. But my main fear still is an explosion in tags not making anything clear anymore. If people already don't seem to get tagging (which can be a difficult concept I agree), will they ever tag a question with 2013 and 2013-sp1 or will they continue to create a sp1
    – Bart Koopman
    Jul 16, 2014 at 11:15
  • 2
    @BartKoopman That's why one of the primary jobs of community editors is to review questions and ensure that they are tagged appropriately. We certainly have enough willing and able to do this (including adding both tags where relevant); all we are lacking is the ability and consensus to do so.
    – Ant P
    Jul 16, 2014 at 12:34
  • Pretty much 100% agree with this answer. We actually say in the wiki pages for version tags ' Version tags should be used only when necessary to provide context to the question, and not to simply state that "you are using SDL Tridion XXXX' . Regarding making this clear in the FAQ, for the most part we have no control over what shows up in the FAQ/Help Center (it is the same across all SE sites.) The Help Center article we can edit is the what's on topic page: tridion.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic
    – Glenn Stevens
    Jul 16, 2014 at 17:15
  • OK - let's get on with it then. For this and for webdev/dav. Only trouble is... how do you delete/edit a tag synonym. Is that a moderator-only privilege?
    – Dominic Cronin
    Jul 19, 2014 at 7:40
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I'm mostly with Ant on this, although I don't think it's all that important for finding specific questions or search. The retagging adds information to the questions and doesn't remove anything so I'm for it.

Tagging started out as quite ad hoc on StackOverflow and slowly got pared down to the level it is today. I think we're just seeing the same sort of effect as we begin to curate our question library.

3

Questions that are version specific like 2009, 2011 and 2013 make sense in my opinion, to go to the detail level of Service Packs or even Hotfix Rollups are useless I would say. I don't see an answer being different on 2013 GA or 2013 SP1. Even though service packs may introduce new functionality, it would be sufficient to tag with just the major release number and any additional details can be added in the question. Certainly also considering a version is supported only though its latest service pack.

Hence the idea to create the as a synonym, so it basically cannot be used (as it will always appear as ). However it seems our audience found it necessary to tag questions with , even though the tag has no description and as such is meaningless.

We could delete the from all questions, but that won't stop anybody from recreating it. Stack Exchange doesn't give us an option for that, unless we assign it as a synonym of something (which in the case of is not really possible I think).

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  • 1
    to go to the detail level of Service Packs or even Hotfix Rollups are useless I would say. I don't see an answer being different on 2013 GA or 2013 SP1 - That's exactly what I'm contesting. I don't see how this is true at all since there are fairly major differences that may have significant impact on how certain problems are solved (such as the existence of the Import Export Service) and what issues and limitations are present in the software.
    – Ant P
    Jul 14, 2014 at 14:24
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    Hence the idea to create the 2013-sp1 as a synonym, so it basically cannot be used (as it will always appear as 2013). However it seems our audience found it necessary to tag questions with sp1 - this in itself is a very strong indicator that the tags "2013" and "2013-sp1" should be distinct. People feel that it's relevant to specify that they are using SP1 (because it often is very relevant - and if they don't specify it's often one of the first questions asked by people looking for clarification).
    – Ant P
    Jul 14, 2014 at 14:26
  • 1
    We could delete the sp1 from all questions, but that won't stop anybody from recreating it. - That's no reason not to kill it. One of the key tasks of community editors is to amend questions to include the correct tags. But before that can happen, the correct tags need to exist.
    – Ant P
    Jul 14, 2014 at 14:34
  • But ultimately the key issue is that the two things aren't synonyms. 2013 and 2013 SP1 are different things (note that that also doesn't mean they're mutually exclusive). If a user deems it relevant, they should be able to make the distinction in their tags. The fact that they can't is what leads to "broken" tags like "SP1" that don't actually mean anything on their own.
    – Ant P
    Jul 14, 2014 at 14:37
  • 1
    @AntP the fact that there currently is a SP1 tag doesn't really indicate that the users found it relevant, just that somebody thought it MIGHT be relevant. If it was a truly relevant tag, it should have gotten a clear description, but a lot of tags are just created (without a proper description or any description what so ever) and are not really useful when classifying a question. The main reason for these tags are for SEO reasons, they are not there for us to make it easy to answer a question. As indicated we can add additional and relevant version information in the question itself.
    – Bart Koopman
    Jul 14, 2014 at 15:13
  • If it was a truly relevant tag, it should have gotten a clear description - it should, but it can't because it is not atomically meaningful. It exists as a side-effect of the fact that the appropriate tag has been disallowed by having made it synonymous with another tag which, in itself, is not sufficient to unambiguously identify the platform in question (where relevant - I'm not suggesting that it is always necessary to be explicit about the fact that you're using SP1).
    – Ant P
    Jul 14, 2014 at 16:23
  • Further, the main reason for these tags is certainly not for SEO reasons (not sure where you got that info from - the tags in themselves are not presented in a manner that is particularly useful for SEO, nor are tags like "2013" in any way useful for SEO) but for allowing questions on particular topics (in this instance relating to a particular platform) to be easily identified and filtered by users already on the site.
    – Ant P
    Jul 14, 2014 at 16:25
  • The purpose of tags is to cleanly categorise questions without cluttering titles and question bodies with redundant information (which is why the consensus on SE is to remove information presented in tags from titles and question bodies) - the tag 2013-sp1 is not redundant, is semantically and non-trivially different to 2013 and proposing to add "I am using SP1" into the body of every question where it's relevant is messy and unnecessary when there is no good reason for the two tags not to co-exist - tags are there to let the question focus on the question rather than the context.
    – Ant P
    Jul 14, 2014 at 16:25
  • As stated, a tag is a keyword that categorizes a question with other, similar questions. Using the right tags makes it easier for others to find and answer your question. That is SEO I would say. On the tridion.stackexchange.com/help/tagging page it is also mentioned that tags are a means of connecting experts with questions they will be able to answer by sorting questions into specific, well-defined categories.
    – Bart Koopman
    Jul 15, 2014 at 7:44
  • I guess we can safely conclude that you and I don't share the same opinion on how to deal with tags, which is absolutely no problem, it just becomes more interesting to gather the views of the rest of this community. Which is why I will tag your meta question with featured and discussion to hopefully attract more attention so we can gather the rest of the communities view on this.
    – Bart Koopman
    Jul 15, 2014 at 7:45
  • That's fine but as you say, tags make finding questions easier and I can certainly see scenarios where I'd be looking to find answers to questions in an SP1-specific scenario. As I've said, it's not relevant all the time, but it does specify more info than just "2013," so it's not redundant. It's also not invalid and it's not a "meta-tag," so I don't see any good reason not to even allow it to be used. Seems like an unnecessary restriction on something that is potentially useful to me.
    – Ant P
    Jul 15, 2014 at 8:02

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