up vote 9 down vote favorite

It came to my attention that there is a tag for

  • ✅ , no description, 76 questions
  • ✅ , with description, but no usage guideline, 52 questions
  • ✅ , with description, but no usage guideline, 78 question
  • ✅ , with description, but no usage guideline, 50 questions
  • ✅ , with description, but no usage guideline, 115 questions
  • ✅ , with description, but no usage guidelines, 51 question**

which all relate to more or less the same type of thing.

A question that comes to mind is, can someone be an expert in rectangle, circle, shape?

  • Do we need all of these tags?
  • Could/should we merge them all to the single shape or polygon?
  • Could/should we merge some of them?
  • Should we simply remove them all?
  • Are these tags only accessory to other more valuable tags?

** The shape could be relevant to 2d and 3d objects, while all of the others are only relevant to 2d (planes).

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up vote 8 down vote accepted

I don't really think any of these are particularly helpful as-is. I'd propose removing all of them.

The few cases where I can think, offhand, that these tags might even potentially apply (rasterization, collision detection and response, and so on) have better, more appropriate tags available already... or we should make appropriate tags (for example, circle-circle collision detection might be useful, but I don't think circle alone is).

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  • But then we'd also need the tags rectangle-rectangle, circle-rectangle, triangle-circle, circle-line, etc, wouldn't we? – Alexandre Vaillancourt♦ Jan 5 '17 at 16:32
  • Maybe. Certainly we shouldn't be creating them pre-emptively. What I mean to suggest is that if all ~75 questions tagged with 'rectangle' end up being about collision between two rectangles maybe that's worth a tag of its own rather than using both "collision" and "rectangle" (persuant to our earlier discussions about avoid doubled-up tags) – Josh♦ Jan 5 '17 at 16:51
  • 2
    circle I can almost see being useful, since there's a particular style of math that usually comes into play when circles/spheres/arcs are involved - radius checks and unit circle trig, occasionally special facts about tangents and chords... so, that might be a legitimate specialty, at least on a math site. But I can't see anyone trying to search for "circle" questions to try to solve a particular gamedev problem, or a game developer identifying themselves a "circle expert" – DMGregory♦ Jan 6 '17 at 17:51
  • In various SE metas, I often see this judgement of, if a thing can't improve outcomes, it might be redundant. Looking briefly at the rectangle questions, the word rectangle itself appears in the titles, so I guess the questions do significantly relate to rectangles. But if someone was looking for a question about rectangles, would the tag would be so much more helpful than the word being in the title? One reason to look for rectangle questions would be to earn points by answering such questions well (a "rectangle expert" user story so to speak). But titles would work in that case. – cardiff space man Jan 8 '17 at 3:42
  • If we decide to remove them, I have some time to edit them all out. – Alexandre Vaillancourt♦ Feb 4 '17 at 20:10
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    I have begun the process of removing all these. – Josh♦ May 14 at 15:56

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