How can we consolidate the Tags?

Basically, tags can be consolidated by anyone who willing to Browse Tags and look for typos, near duplicates, and obvious mistakes. Then edit the articles with those tags and change the tag. Unused tags will disappear from the lists.

Part of the problem is that tags originally were limited to single words, with spaces as a delimiter signifying multiple tags. Then, the KB changed to allow multiple word tags, with a delimiter of a comma between tags. Unfortunately, a lot of people missed this, so we still have some very long tags, that are obviously meant to be multiple tags. I’ve cleaned up some of these, but there are a lot more.

Here are some tag statistics as of April 1, 2010 (no joke).

  • 1,699 unique tags
  • 3,789 taggings
  • 1,204 articles
  • 122 tags with one_or_more_underscores_between_words