Can we do some tag spring cleaning?

Question

Looking at the last 3 pages of tags (sorted by popular), we can see a whole bunch of tags which are used on 5 questions or less. All of the questions with 0 questions (page 9 and some on page 8) are all synonyms of other tags, so we don't have to deal with them. However, that still leaves almost 2 pages of tags which are used very sparingly. Notably, a large number of these tags are in reference to specific languages (such as the-powder-toy). I appreciate the desire to make it easier to find questions on certain topics, but the tagging system isn't designed to be hyper specific.

Therefore, I propose: we sort these tags into three "piles": keep, synonym and delete. For those we decide to remove, trusted users can edit them out of questions, and the system should remove them in due time. However, this discussion is a two-parter:

1. Let's decide which low-usage tags we want and which we don't
2. More generally: should we remove all tags with 5 or fewer questions that refer to a specific language?

I choose 5 simply because I consider that a reasonable threshold. Feel free to suggest your own thresholds if you disagree (please be reasonable).

To be fully clear, the tags that would be removed if the answer to 2. is "yes" would be:

keg, smalltalk, f#, vba, the-powder-toy, dc, japt, klein, s.i.l.o.s, matl, underload, j, prelude, sed, k, box-256, burlesque, swift, lost, starry, hq9+, matlab, powershell, whitespace-language, jelly, deadfish, octave, cubically, x86-family, lua, ruby, bash, sql, cjam, golf-cpu

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Aside from the language specific tags, there are a whole number of tags with not many questions that could either be made into synonyms of more popular tags or just removed outright. To fully catalogue the tags with 5 or fewer questions, here they are along with my opinion with what to do with them. Feel free to suggest alternatives for any and all tags:

Synonyms

• automaton -> cellular-automata
• ast-golf -> atomic-code-golf
• ascii -> printable-ascii
• optical-char-recognition -> image-processing
• average -> statistics or start applying this tag on more questions
• concurrency -> multi-threading
• connected-figure -> graph-theory
• steganography -> cryptography
• cards. I'm not sure what tag would be best for this. I'm currently thinking permutations, but suggestions welcome. Bubbler has suggested card-games in the comments below.

Burninate

• state-abbreviation. I don't see this being a helpful tag to distinguish between questions
• repl. One challenge, closed as a duplicate
• challenge-writing. My personal view is that this should be a meta tag, but I'm open to disagreements
• git. Two challenges: One language-specific for git on +2 and one, not language specific, on -9
• reverse-engineering. One closed challenge on +1, and one challenge about reverse engineering. I don't think the tag is particularly necessary
• 100-little-keg-exercises. Unless more challenges from 100 Little Keg Exercises are posted, I don't think this is especially necessary. Either way, it can be merged with keg
• astronomy. None of the challenges tagged are intrinsically linked with astronomy, rather inspired by it. Personally, I can agree either way with this one.
• golfing-language. 3 of the 5 challenges are closed, and the other two are tips where code-golf would work in substitute.

Keep

• showcase
• restricted-memory
• code-shuffleboard
• proof-golf
• 1p5
• equation, although I wouldn't be opposed to making this a synonym of math
• go. An argument could be made for making this a synonym of board-game, but chess exists as an example of a more specific version of this tag. Of course, we don't want a tage for every board game, so arguments are open.

All other tags with 5 or fewer questions not mentioned are already synonyms.

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I appreciate that this is a lot of tags, and that you might completely disagree with my opinions on any and all of the tags I've mentioned. I'd love to hear the community's views on what we should do with these tags. Whether you'd like to discuss all or one, please post either a comment or an answer, so we can clean up these tags.

And, as a reminder:

We can remove tags from questions, and they'll get auto-removed. Mods can burninate those which are too widespread to easily remove, and certain users can vote on duplicate/synonym tags.

Answer 1

We need to be more careful with language tags

I have a feeling that deleting a language tag for having less than X questions/challenges with it (whatever the value of X is) is not the right way to go. Rather, I want to propose a few challenge types that do warrant a language tag.

Keep the tags which have...

• a well-received challenge which only accepts answers written in that language, or
• a well-received challenge whose core is highly inspired by a unique or interesting feature of that language

This is just a rough proposal, and I'm open to suggestions about the wording or details. The rationale is that Read out C variable declaration, The cell at the end of the rainbow, and Sugar free syntax, as well as most king-of-the-hills and some language-feature-based atomic-code-golfs, are all valid use cases for a language-specific tag in a general challenge.

Specifically, tips questions or metagolf or interpreter challenges do not warrant keeping the language tag.