96

As another question already sufficiently elaborated upon, there is absolutely no sensible reason for the tags and (together ~7k questions) to exist. Naming the concrete product involved is the appropriate tagging here, therefore I propose eliminating these tags for good.

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    Well, we probably shouldn't just remove them from all questions that currently have them, as those questions might not have sufficient other tags and might get lost, so someone will need to go through them manually, so this should probably be a burnination request first. Commented Oct 2, 2013 at 12:16
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    @Dukeling I don't know, maybe we could check for non-closed questions that don't have any other tags, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were only few. And if the question itself can't clarify on why it is MS/Apple-related (thus providing enough information to add a useful tag) the question should be closed as "unclear what you're asking" anyway Commented Oct 2, 2013 at 12:19
  • @TobiasKienzler It's not really / necessarily about any other tags, it's more about some other not-so-useful or incorrect tags. Too many questions are badly tagged, we can't just go closing all of them even if they're good questions otherwise. Commented Oct 2, 2013 at 12:22
  • @Dukeling I'm not sure I can follow you there - how does closing relate to the suggested blacklisting? If you're referring to my previous comment, I can't see how an additional tag microsoft or apple can fix ill-posed questions. And if they are well phrased, stripping those tags won't break anything Commented Oct 2, 2013 at 12:39
  • @TobiasKienzler You mentioned closing... If they have tags like microsoft or apple, there's a decent chance that they aren't properly tagged. There's a fair chance that they are ill-posed as well, but not necessarily, and even if they are, it doesn't mean that, underneath all that, there isn't a really awesome question. So, for these reasons, the questions with those tags needs to be reviewed. Commented Oct 2, 2013 at 12:50
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    And then there's the ambiguity - say there's an Apple product called Pi, and there's an [apple-pi] tag, if a question is tagged [apple][pi] ([pi] meaning the constant 3.14... obviously), we need to change that to [apple-pi] not just remove [apple] and risk losing what the question is about (many questions exclusively mention languages / tools / products via tags - it's not elsewhere in the question at all, and the tags should be sufficiently meaningful). (I don't know if there exists such a case, so I see it as a bit of a risk). Commented Oct 2, 2013 at 12:51
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    @Dukeling That second argument makes sense, though in that case the questions would be a) is there a pie tag that has an entirely different meaning (is there e.g. any excel but the microsoft one?) and b) should the tag be apple-pie instead of pie (since everyone knows what belongs on a proper pie)? Commented Oct 2, 2013 at 12:55
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    Please do note that we haven't been able to get a tag blacklisted in well more than a year.
    – Charles
    Commented Oct 2, 2013 at 17:04
  • @Charles It's been a slow year then ;) Commented Oct 2, 2013 at 17:33
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    Is there no way to blacklist tags moving forward? Why do we have to retag old questions?
    – Sam Axe
    Commented Jan 24, 2014 at 8:02
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    Hm. Why does it still reference those tags on MSE? Commented Jan 21, 2015 at 15:08
  • @Deduplicator looks like a bug, you can report it on MSE. (though it might be caching, so give it a day before reporting) Commented Jan 21, 2015 at 15:18
  • @Deduplicator I made a dummy-edit to fix it, though the same applies to the answers - I won't edit them though, so you can report a bug if it doesn't change... Commented Jan 21, 2015 at 17:49
  • 1
    Might as well blacklist PayPal too while we're at it. Commented Sep 28, 2016 at 1:38

2 Answers 2

37

In general, I would recommend to black-list all the non-programming tags. As Non-Programming questions are off-topic for SO, ie, etc.

For these more specific tags should be included to post. So it is easy to filter out.

Here is more detailed answer.

Things like "Microsoft" and "Apple" are users tagging things incorrectly. The company name is meant to be a part of the tag, like "Microsoft Power Point" would be , but users type it with a space as "microsoft powerpoint" and it suddenly becomes two tags and . The brand is part of the product name. Though we oftentimes just crop off the brand name because it makes the tag longer and it's not really useful.

The and tags are not useful at all. Microsoft and Apple both have a zillion different products under them, which makes these tags extremely ambiguous at best.

These tags should both be burned to death.

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    facebook, twitter, myspace... is fine. It is about the specific product. (if you ask a question tagged twitter, I assume that it involves the twitter API). microsoft and apple are both vendors with a lot of products, so it is not clear about WHAT product this question is, so we need an other tag, which make them both useless. For nokia - I don't know enough. Commented Oct 7, 2013 at 9:37
  • 12
  • Another good example is of a Twitter tag is "twitter-bootstrap". Commented Mar 20, 2015 at 3:22
  • The microsoft tag has just reappeared. I untagged the 3 questions that were tagged with it seems I'm not trusted to (vote to) delete the tag itself. Commented Mar 18, 2016 at 11:43
  • As a reminder to new users who haven't reached the "edit without approval" threshold -- please DO NOT make edit suggestions purely to remove these tags - it requires many more people's effort to then APPROVE those edits.
    – Krease
    Commented Oct 27, 2016 at 1:32
-16

Some questions might be about the company themselves, which is when that tag would be appropriate. If you look at their tag wikis, they are about the corporations, and specifically state to be careful using them.

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    I can't think about a valid reason why a question about Microsoft/Apple is appropiate. Maybe you have an example? Commented Oct 7, 2013 at 11:11
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    asking about corporation is off-topic. Commented Oct 7, 2013 at 11:29
  • 1
    I'll try to come up with an example, but there are certainly plenty of historical questions that those tags could be applied to correctly. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Commented Oct 7, 2013 at 12:03
  • Here's one that's ok: stackoverflow.com/q/926500/13295 Commented Oct 7, 2013 at 13:20
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    I opine that the tag should be microsoft-mvp or similar. Commented Oct 7, 2013 at 13:37
  • Yeh, that's probably a good call. Commented Oct 7, 2013 at 13:44
  • 2
    I took the liberty to fix that, since mvp is definitely the wrong tag there (also @Colin'tHart) Commented Oct 11, 2013 at 9:54

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