First, let's look at the advice from What are tags, and how should I use them?
Avoid meta-tags
Do not use meta-tags in questions. Here are some tips to help you determine whether a tag is a meta-tag:
- If the tag can’t work as the only tag on a question, it’s probably a meta-tag. Every tag you use should be able to work, more or less, as the only tag on a question. Meta-tags, like
[beginner],[subjective], and[best-practices], are not helpful by themselves – they do not communicate anything about the content of the question.- If the tag commonly means different things to different people, it's probably a meta-tag. For example, the meaning of the tag
[subjective]is, itself, subjective; the same is true for tags like[best-practices]and[beginner]. Best practices to whom? Beginner by what criteria? Use only tags that have a broadly accepted, objective definition.
Let's, for now, focus only on the first bit of advice. If the tag can’t work as the only tag on a question, it’s probably a meta-tag.
Here is a list of likely candidates (those marked with a strikethrough currently have no questions using them):
- delete - The very definition of a meta tag. Runs the whole gamut.
editing- Useless without other tags. Useless generally. Presumably about changing something in a specific web app, which should already be a tag on the question. No one is an expert on "editing" on all web apps.filter- Can't possibly work as the only tag on a question. I see it used for gmail (it should be gmail-filters), google-spreadsheets, yahooemail (which should be yahoo-mail), youtube comments. This also seems to run afoul of the second point above (it means different things to different people).- photos - This can't possibly work as the only tag on a question. It needs to be paired with a web app. On the first page of questions I see facebook, google-plus, instagram, twitter, gmail, dropbox. facebook-photos and google-plus-photos exist, at least.
- url - Again, this has no context without the existence of other tags.
web- What could this possibly even mean? Most of the questions tagged are closed. The rest look like web development questions or network protocol curiosity that should also be closed.syntax- syntax-highlighting
- font
- text-formatting
color
So, how should we manage these? This is a problem and it seems to be getting worse. ("Broken windows" and all that.) Should we have a canonical "help clean up these meta-tags" question/answer, or should each individual one get its own question/answer (and arguments)?
There are also some other problematic tags that I think border on meta-tags, but will be harder to justify removing. (For instance, email, based on its wiki, is for any webmail service that doesn't already have a tag. Not that it's used that way, of course.)
See also:
googleis used sometimes as meta-tag. See Please don't double tag Google itemsgoogleshould not be generally removed as a tag just in certain cases that it's used with other tags likegoogle-searchbut there is no evident reason for including both of them.