Today, I manually removed the misspelled tag registraton from two separate questions. While this was an easy thing with only two questions having the tag, either making the misspelling a synonym or deleting it and putting it on the blacklist will prevent it from happening again. And it is an easy misspelling to make and a hard one to notice when gazing at the word.
While I changed the tags, I also noticed that there is a signup-signon tag. While we could make a case that if you nitpick it, signup-signon can be used for questions which refer to both, and registration should be reserved to questions which are only about signon, it seems that the users are not nitpicking. They frequently use signup-signon in combination with either registration or login. When it is used alone, such as in Password field in cleartext, one of the other two would obviously be also appropriate, in this case registration.
So my second suggestion is to burninate signup-signon, as its usage shows that it is redundant. The separate words, signup and signon, could be created as new tags and be made synonyms of registration and login respectively. Simply making the double tag a synonym does not seem possible, as it is usually applied to questions which refer to only one of the two concepts.
It would make sense to also manually assign either login or registration to questions which have signup-signon before burninating. I'm extrapolating this to touch 30 to 35 questions. If they are considered too many to bump, maybe at least do it for the 3-4 questions which have no other tag applied.
Update I went and manually edited 7 questions which had no tag at all beside [signup-signon]. I also checked the search syntax and noticed that you can exclude a tag :) so now I know that we have exactly 45 questions left which have [signup-signon] but neither [registration] nor [login]. We could either
- simply burninate the tag and accept that 45 questions will have inferior tagging
- gradually edit the 45 questions by hand, so we get only a few bumps per day, then burninate
- do a big bang edit action and live with the front page being overtaken for a few hours. The initial disruption shouldn't last too long, 45 questions are quickly edited and we get many other bumps from normal activity. But of course, people will start reanswering, so the results will probably linger for days.
- only manually edit the questions which need login instead of registration. From my experience with the first 7, I expect them to be less than half. Then ask the team if they can automatically replace the tag for the others without bumping.
Which alternative is the best? Or is there a solution I've overlooked?
