If you are thinking these are some environmental news headlines, you are mistaken. These are some of the new tags created on the site.
As of late, many new tags are being created for every single question. If we look at some, they are really meaningless and silly tags. Some are meta tags which add nothing to the question, ambiguous (which means different meaning to different persons) or either can't stand as a single tag on the question. Some tags contain spelling mistakes too.
distortion, pollution, mass-destruction, authentic, superiority, power, works, dates, evil, people, rain, translation, destruction-of-earth, system
There are many like this.
For example, if we take power, what would be the scope of the tag? Which questions should be tagged with that tag?
We should not create a tag because the question contains that word or phrase somewhere in the title or body. They should describe the topic of the question on the whole. More than half of the tags created are for that cause.
A tag is a keyword or label that categorizes your question with other, similar questions. Using the right tags makes it easier for others to find and answer your question.
Please see the guide which is followed while creating a tag. The Death of Meta Tags
While many are of unnecessary category, there is another category called dependent and meta tags. Jeff Atwood says in the above blog post:
The reason meta-tags are a problem is that they do not describe the content of the question. They describe some other aspect of the question, like the author’s skill level, or the author’s motivation for asking it, or generally what “kind” of question it is (poll, how-to, etc.).
Meta-tags are actually a subset of a larger problem that I usually call dependent tags. These are tags that don’t say anything by themselves – you can’t tell what the question is about unless they’re paired with some other tag (or several of them). These tags are a problem because people don’t realize this and will often use that as the question’s only tag.
Another case is words with non English letters and phonetics. The English alphabet are insufficient to fit all the sounds and phonetics. So, it would be difficult to add accurate accent found in world languages (like French, German etc., which have letters like é, ü, ö. Some names contain those letters which give accurate pronunciation),.
Unfortunately, there is no way to include those letters in our tags. Hence, we generally go with simplified translation (because they are generally used, popular and easily found out in site's and google search). When that happens, we would go with the simplified versions. instead of ü, we use only u.
So, when you find new tags which are unnecessary or ambiguous, please remove them and tag with existing accurate tags.
Please create tags only when required.
Finally, I want to stress that these are usually added in good faith, and I am not questioning anybody's motivation - I know that they all mean well. But the added tags are noise or not much useful. So, please modify them. We need community help in cleaning up these tags. When you do the cleanup, also take care that the homepage is not flooded with these tag edits.
Worth reading - Please zap the meta-tags and dependent tags
Tagging help center - What are tags, and how should I use them?
