I noticed today that a bunch of recently created tags already existed under slightly different spellings/pronunciations/variations. The new tags page displays 13 recently created tags, five of which already existed. This means that more than a third of recently created tags were unnecessary:
A tag that does not have any questions utilizing it is automatically deleted by the system after 24 hours. In this case, all the duplicates only had one question each. I took the liberty of replacing the tag on those questions, so these five tags will now be automatically deleted.
Duplicate tags are problematic because it spreads content over multiple tags instead of having all related content under one name. In this particular case I think the problem is fixed, but more generally speaking is this an issue?
Should we have a way (assuming it is possible) to keep track of this, so that it can be fixed when it occurs?
Should we have a way (assuming it is possible) to prevent it from happening in the first place?
Is this just something minor that we should ignore?
