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While tagging questions, it appears that there are both singular and plural tags for plenty of terms as stated in this question. Assuming that there is no semantic difference between the singular and plural state of the tag, which one should we prefer? The one which was used more or the one which was used less up to that time?

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You should add this as an answer to the existing discussion. – fretje Mar 8 '10 at 15:11
    
Since this is a question, I didn't consider adding this as an answer. – Mehper C. Palavuzlar Mar 8 '10 at 16:28
up vote 4 down vote accepted

EDIT: Now that the platform supports tag synonyms, singular/plural tags with the same meaning should just be synonym-ified.

There should be a standard for this sort of thing, for consistency in the future. It'll cut down on retag requests, since the singular will become the one that's used more often (which seems to be the current rule). I admit that it won't eliminate them completely, due to new users and others who don't get the memo, but it'll help.

In cases where there's no semantic difference, I vote for using singular, just to save typing the extra letter.

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I find "just to save typing the extra letter" to be a very simplistic argumentation. Isn't it a lot more important which of the two is more intuitive? – Steven Jeuris Oct 20 '11 at 8:51

Sometimes there is a difference - one example is "assembly" - in the singular this tends to mean "assembly language", in the plural it seems to mean something related to web services programming (although sometimes people annoyingly use the singular for this too).

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The one which was used more, which tends to be the singular one.

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