What are we going to do about duplicate language tags?

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I’ve taken a look through the tags list, and I’ve noticed that a few languages have multiple tags (e.g. #español/#spanish or #deutsch/#german). This makes the tag system less useful.

It looks like Discourse has support for tag aliases, so I think that we should set those up as early as possible to avoid any more duplicates.

The one thing that we need to decide on is which format to use for language tags. The English-language tags are currently slightly more popular than their native-language counterparts, but either one will work.

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Not sure if that’s possible or the right way (probably not), but couldn’t user tag creation just be entirely disabled?

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You’re right: that would also be something to consider. At the moment, people appear to be creating sensible tags (apart from this issue with duplicates, which can be fixed with aliases). However, I’ve seen other websites where the tagging system has become nearly useless, due to people using/creating random tags.

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Thanks for the ping @TwistedSnake, I’ve added the local name of the language as a “tag synonym” to the English name, this way people can tag a topic in both local or English names and will end up showing in the same place.

I wouldn’t be too worried about people creating tags, that’s the goal of having them. Discourse has powerful tools to merge or remove unused tags and a nice UI that always suggests the most used ones when picking one.

Unless a major issue is found, I would suggest we keep allowing organic tag creation, which is currently used by some communities to post content over #general and allows to observe when a topic has enough volume to have its own category and by #help-and-support questions.

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Thanks for cleaning up the duplicates! I agree that user-created tags are the best way forward.

There are two other tags that should be merged: #brazil and #brazil. Apart from that, everything looks good. :slightly_smiling_face:

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It’s pretty common on there “old” support site to label posts as “lang-XX” where XX is replaced with the two letter code for the language in question. Would that be a more consistent tagging?

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Not sure, I was thinking what’s the most natural way for people to tag topics without having to figure out what the right format is.

My assumption is that people that don’t speak English will first try to tag their post with their language name under the local name, some may try to the English name of the language.

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