Context
I saw a question with the tag k-nn
for K-Nearest Neighbors. I thought it was a typo and that it should be changed to knn
. To my surprise, the knn
tag didn't exist and isn't a synonym either.
I thought "fair enough" and wanted to add knn
as a synonym for k-nn
so that people like me would find it easier or would not try to create an unnecessary tag.
Problem
I was unable to add a synonym for the tag because it requires a score of at least 5 in that tag. I then tried to add a synonym for a tag for which I did meet that requirement. It said that the synonym must have already been used in the site to be added.
Proposal
I feel that adding synonyms should be more accessible. The primary goal of tags is to filter questions in an efficient way. The enemies of this are:
- missing tags
Currently, tags like
knn
orautomated-machine-learning
do not exist. If someone searches for them, they might think they need to add them to the site. Which leads to:
- redundant tags
If they don't know about
k-nn
andautoml
we will have redundant tags. To fix it, someone will need to point this out, and provide them as synonyms of each other.
I propose that suggesting synonyms should be open to every member (with enough reputation). The reviewing process might need to be stricter but I do believe it would serve the reason tags exist in the first place more efficiently.