Do we really need to discuss every new tag?

Question

So, I've been caught up in a bit of tag creation scandal lately. I have sufficient privileges to create new tags and do so when I feel they benefit the site. So far, in my six months here, I have created two or three tags. Each of these have been met with some resistance.

I have tried posting metas first, but that seems to result in bickering between the people who care about categorization and an utter lack of interest from the community at large. It took a few days to decide to hash out the details, and by then I had more important obligations. I completely forgot about it until a mod pinged me saying it had been created. This does not feel like a productive way to go about creating new tags.

So, the next time I thought we could use a new tag, I simply created it. I was slowly adding it to qualified questions as I had time. This activity seemed to go unnoticed until I posted a meta (more or less just to have a visible place to save my candidate question search). Then it kind of hit the fan with debate, and has since been in limbo. Again, tag metas don't seen to gain the interest of the community at large.

Now, please don't get me wrong, some very good things came out of those conversations. However, it's nothing that wouldn't have eventually been handled with a synonym.

Do we really need to be talking about each and every tag before it is created? This seems really counter productive to me.

Answer 1

Language and technology tags shouldn't warrant immediate discussion. If a new question is asked and the appropriate language tag doesn't exist, then go ahead and add it. However, some technology tags may not be so straightforward, especially some language-specific ones. Still, I wouldn't worry too much about those, as they may still be useful.

The ones that may warrant discussions are ones like arguments. The problem with these may lie in the lack of similarities between the questions. They may also be considered too general, especially if a lot of questions can be tagged with them just because they contain that thing somewhere. There may also be some meta-ness to them, as they don't relate to the purpose of the code itself, unless it's example code.

If you want to be cautious, you can open a new discussion if you're not too sure about the overall usefulness of the tag. It may be better than instantly retagging several questions, only to find out that it wasn't even a good tag.