Tag: [macintosh] or [apple-macintosh], [amiga] or [commodore-amiga]

Question

Continuing in the theme of the Apple II tag discussion...

We went with apple-ii because that's how the computer is referred to, but most people say "Macintosh" rather than "Apple Macintosh", suggesting that the tag for Mac questions should simply be macintosh.

On the other hand, if you want to search by tag for all Apple products, "apple-*" will just get you the Apple II line, the Lisa, and maybe a stray Newton, with no Macs in sight.

Put in concrete terms, if somebody has a question about the "educational Mac" (such as this one), should the tag be:

• the product name: emac
• company hyphen product: apple-emac
• widely-known trademark hyphen product: macintosh-emac
• company hyphen product-line hyphen product: apple-macintosh-emac

I'm leaning toward macintosh being a "root", but apple-macintosh is not unreasonable. For the situation above, apple-emac seems best, especially since "emac" includes "mac" in its name.

There's a similar question around amiga vs. commodore-amiga. The latter groups better with commodore-pet, but note the variety of "amiga"-root tags in, say, this question.

Answer 1

I would think that apple would only be required when the tag is referring to the name of the product that contains apple (like you mentioned, apple-ii) or you need to disambiguate it from something else named the same.

Macintosh won't really be used in any other way here. Pet however could. My pet sat on a CRT and it exploded so I could see using commodore-pet in that instance.... By the same token, if the site were primarily Spanish, I would want the tag amiga to be commodore-amiga to help differentiate with the Spanish word.

I would also say there should be generic retro tags for each old company like commodore, hp, Xerox, etc.. Then when you search, just search for both tags, product and company to help filtering.