How to deal with generic and ambiguous tags

Question

As the list of tags is growing and growing, lots of (IMHO) relatively meaningless tags are popping up and as soon as they are there, will get adopted by new users because they appear in autocompletion.

Examples for meaningless tags:

• filename
• get
• all
• values

If I see a new tag like this I tend to remove it from the question and if possible replace it with an existing more useful tag.

Then there are tags that could have different meanings depending on the context. Usually there are already other more specific tags that could have been used instead.

Examples for ambiguous tags:

• grid could be admin grid (admin-grid) or product grid (grid-layout)
• filter could be layered navigation (layered-navigation) or collection filtering (collection-filtering)

Question:

1. should we try to get rid of meaningless tags by removing them from all questions?

2. Should be strive to replace ambiguous tags with more specific ones as well (editing hundreds of questions...)? And/or reference the alternative tags in the wiki at least?

   I already added this excerpt for the grid tag, which is shown while you add the tag to a question:

   This tag is ambiguous. Use "admin-grid" for admin grids, "grid-layout" for grid view in the catalog

   https://magento.stackexchange.com/tags/grid/info

Answer 1

You're right that curation is what we need. Improving ambiguous tags is part of this (e.g. admin-grid vs. grid, as is the removal of worthless tags (e.g. get).

Beyond this, we can clean things up via tag synonyms.

Answer 2

Sounds like we want to have a bot. Is it allowed to implement a bot for such things?

We should remove tags like php too