How many mentions warrant a tag?

Question

Ideally it should not be a critical mass issue, but one of utility. A tag for "information" would be extremely populated but of little value, and a tag for "inverse relations" would specify - I trust - a very limited set, but also be of little value.

That said, if a very small number of questions related to a very salient topic, do they deserve a tag due to projection of further population of the set or strictly because of their salience? How many questions that happen to contain a given topic make it worthwhile to create a tag connecting them?

Answer 1

This should be done with care, but I think there are cases when the number of actual or anticipated questions is small but the topic is one that somebody might wnat to be able to look up. That is, tags are primarily for partitioning a large space, but they are also for being able to find a needle in a haystack. There may be only a handful of questions on, say, kiruv, but we might want to be able to find them.

I think the quality of the tags -- consistency and organization -- is going to end up being more important than a minimum size. But this is my first experience with group-managed tags (as opposed to individual-managed tags, e.g. in my own blog).

Answer 2

The questions that I tend to keep in the back of my head when making tagging decisions are:

1. Would anyone browsing this site be interested in browsing a list of all questions related to this topic?

2. How many questions related to this topic are likely to exist after the site's been around for a long time?

   a. One (the one at hand)

   b. Many

(I phrased the second question thus because the site and its tags will hopefully be around for a long time, and it's impossible to predict the answer to this question over the long term more precisely than the choices I've laid out.)

If and only if the answers are Yes and b, then I think it makes sense to create the tag.