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Do you think tag is helpful?

I introduced it: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/chess

World Engineer removed it from: Which paradigm to use for writing chess engine? as extraneous.

My position is that chess programming is a distinct and well researched field of its own, and since people seem to take interest in the theory behind it, the tag would play a helpful role.

It's also worth noting that the quality of chess-related questions and answers is typically good (in compare to average).

I'm asking about your opinion on the matter, both in the narrow and broad aspect:

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Programmers's currently comes up with 5 questions.

  • 1 is closed
  • All are positively voted
  • All are relatively low views (< 500)

Searching programmers for chess questions comes back with 36 results.

  • (Somewhat surprisingly) All are either neutral or positively voted
  • Very few are closed
  • A significant number of them are directly related to chess, and not just mentioning the word chess.

For that particular question, I think tagging it with was the right thing to do. And the search results indicate there are several other questions that could / should have their tags updated.

More broadly, I think is a useful tag for the site and we ought to keep it. There's a fair amount of material that could get aggregated into that tag.

So I would propose we have a reverse tag-cleanup where we go through the above search and make sure the questions are tagged appropriately.

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I removed it as being overly specific and unlikely to come up in searches of the site. I try not to flood the front page with edits which is why I did not remove it entirely.

Chess analysis as a programming thing is more algorithm theory than software engineering and thus unlikely to come up much as a tag. It's certainly a valid domain and very interesting as a field of research but we have both Game Dev and CS Stack Exchanges where it would find a wider audience.

Game Dev has 6 questions with the tag, only 4 have a positive scores. CS has questions on Chess algorithms and such but lacks the tag. It's a "Do Not Use" tag on Stack Overflow. I'm inclined to agree with their perspective.

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    I agree with many of the broader points in your answer, but I don't think that we need to cede chess to other SE sites. I think Programmers can provide a site-unique point of view focusing on the pragmatic aspects of designing chess algorithms.
    – user53019
    Commented Jan 15, 2014 at 17:10
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    I agree with everything you're saying, though I have to say this feels a little low-risk to be worth bothering with. Perhaps in the future somebody's doing some chess algorithm coding and finds a Q on here, it would be handy for them to click the chess tag and find the few others with that tag, so there's the Pro, and "it's not necessary" is kind of a neutral point, I find no Con to having this tag for us because it won't explode or be abused. I would side with keeping it until there appears reason to clean it out, this can always be done later if some problem arises.
    – Jimmy Hoffa
    Commented Jan 15, 2014 at 19:12
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    @JimmyHoffa Just playing devils advocate here, but when typing a question about Chess the suggestions were actually pretty close without the existence of a chess tag. With that being said, I think that it is on topic and a low interest thing so I don't see any cons to keeping the chess tag. I also don't particularly care to circumvent a fellow mods decision over something like this. Perhaps if this answer gets negatively scored I will.
    – maple_shaft Mod
    Commented Jan 15, 2014 at 22:06

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