Well chosen tags improve the experience of the site regarding browsing and searching. If we would create some guidelines regarding tag names, we could get more consistent tags and avoid creating too much synonyms.
Here are some suggestions, how tag names could be chosen:
- Doing and how-to: routing, switching, testing (the -ing form, gerund, would be nice)
- Concepts and protocols: spanning-tree, vss, qos, ospf, mpls
- Things: interfaces, firewalls (plural preferred)
- Hardware and manufacturers: cisco, juniper
I suggest we better create basic tags, which built the tag list of a question, instead of very specific long tags consisting of words and dashes. Let's keep in mind that for searching tags can be combined, so a user can combine the manufacturer cisco with mpls as protocol, so no need for cisco-mpls.
I speak about rough guidelines, meaning conventions like plural and gerund. Also here it's not always easy to decide whether to use one or the other, for example routing for working with routing but routers for hardware discussions - may be good to have both, clearly distinguished in their tag wiki explanation, or in similar cases to decide for one.
While thinking of tags, let's keep in mind that at some time we may have a thousand tags and more.
