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This question has been asked before Should a cats/dogs tag always be added to kittens/puppies questions?. I'm asking that now the site has grown and is developing that the accepted answer to this is no longer suitable. Can we revise this?

is synomised with , I'm wondering as the site is growing, if we should separate them and other similar tags, e.g. .

There's many questions that are specific only to when an animal is young and this would assist searching posts. The tags are what assists in generating search engine results. So if someone has an issue with a kitten they will search kitten, we only have cats. A search on posts with kitten as:question in it yields 296 results. With a tag search it will give better results in search engines like Google. (I'm trying to get some stats on this on Stack Exchange meta)

Should we break up these synonymised tags? What do people think?

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  • @JamesJenkins I knew there was a question about it! thanks. I think this should be revisited ttytt. As the site gets bigger, it warrants separate tags. The needs of the young is very different from the adults. – user6796 May 9 '17 at 10:13
  • Colomb not a bad idea at all I'd vote yes if I could. – toothless199 Jul 13 '17 at 10:22
  • @toothless199 you can upvote or downvote any post in meta. :) You can also write an answer – user6796 Jul 14 '17 at 13:59
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I suspect if we implemented this suggestion, folks would apply to questions where the problem is not unique to kittens (which should be tagged ). You'd be asking the questioner (who may not have enough knowledge/experience to know the difference between cat and kitten problems) to make that judgement call.

Alternately, this system would require a frequent user to retag many posts to differentiate between cat and kitten problems. People come and go, take breaks and have periods of high activity. I don't think it's a good idea to set up a structure that requires someone to keep such a close watch.

If the tags were applied incorrectly/inconsistently (as I suspect would happen because of the two failure modes explained above), then having separate tags has negative value. Folks would need to search in and for a problem that their adult cat may be experiencing but was first asked about in a kitten.

Examples of questions that would likely be tagged kitten based on questioner's use of the word (if that option had existed for them), but should be .

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  • I agree and disagree. I'm really not sure how important it is. It's more the search results I'm concerned with. The most popular tag goes into the title of the question and assists with search hits within search engines. But I guess many people searching for advice on kittens will search on cats? I hope. Or encourage people to put kitten in the title – user6796 Jul 14 '17 at 13:50
  • Well, I agree with @Zaralynda as most people will probably get it wrong with their cats/kittens but only if you expect everyone to know the difference between cats and kittens (like maybe you do) that could work. – toothless199 Jul 14 '17 at 17:39

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