How should we handle tags appearing in one question only?

Question

The "New" tab in the Tags section contains tags so specific each one of them appear in one question only since their creation. This looks like a sign they aren't significant - or even pointless - and may be safely removed. Examples are: normal-generation, procedural-destruction, or raymarching.

I'm not sure though how to tell what tags are to be removed, and what are to be replaced by more appropriate and popular tags.

Should we simply remove such tags, or are there better tags we can use as replacements?

Answer 1

Tags that are applied to only one question get automatically removed after a certain period of time, specifically because they are considered irrelevant.

I've implemented a routine that removes tags created more than 6 months ago which have been used only a single time. It will run monthly. (Source)

If you feel the tag is relevant, find another question to which it could be applied and add the tag to it, this will make sure that the tag is kept alive.

If not, nothing should be done, and let the magic system handle things :)

Answer 2

As Alexandre says, they'll get nuked automatically. You shouldn't need to do anything.

The three tags you listed, however, seem pretty relevant to game development. I added two of them. procedural-destruction was used to replace polygon and algorithm in a question about breaking an object into pieces at runtime based on some physics information. This is a really common operation in game development for destructible fences, props, et cetera with a variety of interesting solutions. "polygon algorithm" is a pretty useless way of describing that problem domain.

Similarly for normal-generation, we do have quite a few questions on the ways to produce normals from geometry. This seems sufficiently distinct a problem domain from, say, using normals in some particular kind of lighting computation that I believe it's worth calling out as an area of expertise.