Proposed naming scheme for Tandy computer related tags

Question

Preface

Our tagging scheme for tags relating to Tandy computers is incomplete and inconsistent. Yesterday I started the discussion thread, New [trs-80] tag conundrum . An earlier thread exists for the Color Computer -- Tag Discussion: coco or color-computer . wizzwizz4 suggested we have a vote-type proposal, which is what this thread is. (His suggestion also included a second (third?) thread specifically for the Color Computer, but for reasons which will hopefully become clear, I don't think we need it, but if folks disagree, I'll write one.)

First, let's start with pre-existing tags:
trs-80-model-iii (two uses, one of them yesterday
trs-80 (three uses, created by me yesterday)
tandy-1000 (three uses)
color-computer (eighteen uses)
coco (four uses)

I had thought simply by creating the trs-80 tag, it would support the z80 family of TRS-80 Models I, II, III, and 4. However, the Model II turned out to be a separate animal to the other 3, which were inexpensive home/educational machines. The Model II and its descendants turned out to be a different animal, very expensive business machines, with the daughter models eventually offering a 68000 CPU and Unix.)

Proposal

1. Create the following tags:
   trs-80-model-1-family, with description stating it supports Model I, Model III, and Model 4
   trs-80-model-2-family, with description stating it supports the Model II, Model 12, Model 16B, and the "Tandy 6000"
   trs-80-color-computer, name matching Tandy's actual name . Supports the Color Computer 1, 2, and 3 (there was no "Model" in their names)
2. Delete the following tags, first editing existing threads to use one of the above:
   trs-80 (I just made it yesterday, so it has no history)
   trs-80-model-iii (until yesterday, it had only been used once)
3. Convert the following tags to synonyms for trs-80-color-computer
   color-computer
   coco
4. Edit the description for tandy-1000. It currently is written to support all models of Tandy IBM "compatibles". However, the Tandy 1000 was a better clone of the IBM PCjr. Tandy's normal (AT class) IBM compatible was their Tandy 2000 (which for some reason, preceded the Tandy 1000). The three pre-existing questions for tandy-1000 were specifically for the PCjr clone machine. Also, it appears no one has ever asked a question concerning the Tandy 2000. I guess we would need to create a new tandy-2000 tag should anyone do so.
5. I have sufficient privilege and willingness to do this. I think it will take less time than I spent writing this proposal.

Notes

1. See yesterday's thread for discussion about Roman vs Arabic numerals. There appears to be consensus that since Tandy was inconsistent, we should be. Also, some society's appear not to recognize lower-case roman numerals anyway.
2. All new and remaining tags have consistent manufacturer-model form. The manufacturer in "TRS" is Tandy Radio Shack. The synonyms will allow for popular names to be supported, such as "CoCo".

6 Days Later

Is 2 votes and 25 views enough to proceed?

Answer 1

(response to wizzwizz4's answer)
Having read thru your answer, it appears you basically agree with my proposal, but feel there should be numerous tag synonyms added, to cover virtually every model and numeral system. This caused me to step back and think about how I use tags.

1. to search for similarly tagged questions or simply explore, finding what questions people had asked about a tag. Basically if I am reading a question with a tag of interest, I can click the tag and see what else had been tagged. Or from the main Tag page, I might simply explore.
2. to provide one or more pre-existing tags for a new question I am writing. SE has a very nice "live" system of modifying the tag list as one types, showing potential tags for what you have already typed. What you have typed might even be in the middle of a suggested tag.
3. Maybe other people use tags for something additional, but I have not needed to do so.

Would the multitude of specific TRS-80 synonyms be useful? Assume they don't exist. Now let's imagine a person is asking a specific question concerning the TRS-80 Model III. At one point they will scroll down to the tags field, but for some reason can't remember that it's name started with "TRS-80". So they begin typing "model". At some point two suggested tags will show themselves, trs-80-model-1-family and trs-80-model-2-family. (No other tags currently exist incorporating the word "model".) They can read the two tag descriptions appearing beneath the tags, and see that the Model 1 tag includes the TRS-80 Model III. Having synonyms for trs-80-model-3 and trs-80-model-iii would not have aided the questioner. They wouldn't have hurt, but they did not turn out to be useful. Can anyone give a scenario where such a large group of related synonyms would be useful?

I know you support synonyms color-computer and coco. Cool. These are different because they were common names for the computers, and many folks would not associate the text "TRS-80" as being a part of the name. There appears to already be a tag co-co. It resolves to the current CoCo tag. Since my proposal changes the coco tag to a synonym, I would edit or replace the co-co to point to trs-80-color-computer. I have no objection to also having a colour-computer synonym, although I could find no evidence that Tandy itself ever used the British spelling. I even found an Australian Radio Shack Catalog which used "Color Computer". But bottom line, it could prove useful, so I agree with including colour-computer as a synonym.

Answer 2

This is my personal opinion; if yours differs feel free to post your own answer.

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CoCo

To start off: coco and color-computer should definitely be synonyms of whatever we decide should be the definitive tag.

We have a tag synonym colour-display → color-display, so should we have a similar one for color-computer? Looking properly, I have found this image:

^{From the Centre for Computing History.}

This suggests that we should have a synonym colour-computer → color-computer.

Families

Your plan for the family tags (trs-80-model-1-family and trs-80-model-2-family) leaves them more verbose than would be ideal, but I don't think there's a way around that.

However, I feel that deleting the trs-80-model-iii tag would be a waste. I vote that the following synonyms be created:

Of trs-80-model-1-family:

• trs-80-model-i-family
• trs-80-model-1
• trs-80-model-i
• trs-80-model-3
• trs-80-model-iii
• trs-80-model-4

Of trs-80-model-2-family:

• trs-80-model-ii-family
• trs-80-model-2
• trs-80-model-ii
• trs-80-model-12
• trs-80-model-60b
• tandy-6000

Tandy 1000

That plan (to make tandy-1000 just about tandy-1000 and have a new tandy-2000 tag when there's a question about it) seems good. I have nothing to add.

General naming conventions

I'm all for consistency... but not at the expense of completely unnecessary verbosity. apple-apple-ii? That's duplicating Apple, which is obviously not your intention. tandy-trs-80-model-2-family shows that this applies to acronyms too. So, the adapted rule is:

• Use the format manufacturer-model
• unless the model name includes the manufacturer name
• or an acronym that when expanded contains the manufacturer name.

This falls down in many situations; I'll give just one: zx-spectrum. Should this be sinclair-zx-spectrum? timex-zx-spectrum? Who even calls it one of these?

I vote that model and family tags should be:

• Unique;
• Not overly verbose; and
• Actually used by people.

Most of our model and family tags already fulfil these criteria. And, to be frank, do we really need anything more than this? It works, doesn't have special cases, and is already the implicit policy if I've read the room right.

Answer 3

Responding to just one particular aspect of this:

As someone whose native spelling of "color" is "colour," I think that, for all cases (CoCo or otherwise)

We should not have "colour" synonyms for "color"

My reasoning this that American English is the best known variant worldwide, and every English speaker is familiar with the existence of it. Further, every English speaker who uses the "colour" spelling knows that the American variant is "color" and is more common. Anybody involved with computers in particular is used to searching for "color" as well as "colour" because the vast majority of computer code/documentation/etc. uses the American spelling. (This is often deliberate; I myself always use "color" in code, comments and most documentation specifically because of the searching issue.)

Further, typing "colo" will complete tags containing the word "color" or "colour." This has two consequences:

1. Someone searching for "colour" is very likely to find the tags "color" tags either via them popping up due to slow typing, or because he typed only that much of the prefix.
2. Because tag synonyms show up in searches (e.g., type 8080 and you'll see the tag 8080 and the alias intel-8080) all of the "colour" synonyms would show up as well, making the search harder rather than easier, especially for a common world like "color." Tag synonyms are not an issue in searches since they are removed as necessary to make sure that all tags with that word, up to six, are displayed.

Given that I think this should be an overall policy, not just about the CoCo, perhaps there should be a separate question and answer about this.

Answer 4

So, after 581 days (and three or four voters), we currently still have just:

• trs-80 (x15), still saying it applies to Model II
• trs-80-model-iii (x4)
• color-computer (x21)
• coco (x6)
• color-basic (x3)

I'd like to suggest we go ahead now with:

1. Moving to the three tags suggested in the question (trs-80-model-1-family, trs-80-model-2-family and trs-80-color-computer), along with trs-80-color-basic for consistency and searchability for those looking for all our "TRS-80" categories.
2. Doing the color-computer and coco aliases as per the question.
3. Changing trs-80-model-iii to an alias, so we're at least not moving away from wizzwizz4's suggestion for all those aliases.

That leaves us in a better place than we are now, and we can continue our discussion about aliases separately without that holding back a useful change that we do seem to agree on. (And users who have 5 points of votes on answers in those tags will immediately be able to suggest aliases, which might give us useful feedback.)

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Just to satisfy my curiousity about the details of how this gets done: I notice that only moderators can rename tags and this seems like it would want renames. Or is it fine for a non-moderator just to create the new tags and tag everything above with them, remove the old tags, wait a day for the now-unused old tags to be deleted, and then suggest aliases as necessary? That seems to need editing of every question, which would both be a lot of work and bump them all.