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I was scrolling through the question list this evening when I noticed Software engineering - “Precious project” syndrome? What made this question stick out was the tag.

Looking through the list of questions with that tag, the majority are closed for various reasons. 10 of the 12 questions are currently closed. Many of these questions are quite old, as well.

Spot checking a few, it seems "not constructive" and "off-topic" are common reasons. There is no tag wiki, but I imagine the idea behind it has to do with how people think about a software engineering topic or why people behave the way they do on software teams: both of which would fall under "primarily opinion-based." Which is, in fact, the reason for my close vote on the original question that spawned this meta-post.

Should the "psychology" tag exist on this site given the current contents of the help center? Given the unconstructive contents of the questions with that tag and the low number of questions sharing that tag, should those questions be deleted or the tag be blacklisted?

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  • some of the questions in there are likely better to retag
    – gnat
    Nov 2, 2014 at 10:41

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
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I have removed the tag from that question.

The tag will now disappear overnight.

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We've almost got the psychology tag gone. There is one question remaining that happens to be locked (it doesn't show up in - you need to use this query to find it).

https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/78956/i-no-longer-want-to-be-a-developer

Since this is a locked question I can't flag it for a mod to tweak it.

I suggest:

  • removing
  • possibly adding the . No, thats not a great tag either. But it does help find the related questions on the side if someone should happen to visit it in the future.
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  • Looking through the other tags on that question, motivation, self-improvement and burnout all seem to suffer from the same issues as psychology.
    – user22815
    Dec 9, 2014 at 20:05
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    @Snowman a lot of them do. Its one of those places where you go and click and go 'eww'. We kind of need to have some of them left around so that we don't have untagged questions. But, if we can concentrate them into a small enough area that people are likely to find (psychology - not so much. Burnout is something oft mentioned), we may be able to properly manage those questions without having to delete them too. Its partly how well others use the tags now that motivates cleanup on them.
    – user40980
    Dec 9, 2014 at 20:08
  • believe it or not but I figured a way to flag this issue for mod attention :)
    – gnat
    Dec 9, 2014 at 20:37
  • @Snowman of the tags you listed, only burnout looks actionable. In terms of volume, it's similar to "psychology": 29 questions total, 2 open, 1 locked. And it seems to have good "retag-potential" which played an important role in current cleanup. Two other tags are just too large, have too much open questions and seem to be harder to retag; I love the idea but unfortunately it's easy to imagine their cleanup taking several months or even a year, which feels a bit too much of a "gigantic waste of time and effort"
    – gnat
    Dec 11, 2014 at 18:03
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Update: tag is gone.

There are no questions tagged psychology anymore (not even locked ones, thanks to ChrisF) and tags page doesn't suggest it anymore when one tries to enter "psychology".

After all the questions were retagged or deleted, system took care of the tag:

Tags not associated with any question are automatically destroyed...

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