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I noticed there is a tag for as well as . Is there any good reason for this really?

Perhaps wordpress-3.0 and wordpress-3.1 but surely not down to the revision level?

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4 Answers

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The initial aim of the tag was for help with features and functions that were added in, well, WordPress 3. Now their meaning is more of a catch-all - there are a worrying amount of questions with just a wordpress-* tag.

I'm not entirely convinced anymore about the usefulness of version tags in any form.

They've become somewhat of a virus. Easy to catch, difficult to remove.

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But there is no such thing as WordPress 3. There is major version WordPress 2.9, and major version WordPress 3.0. "WordPress 3" is a non-entity, and should not be used as a tag, regardless of whether version-specific tags are de rigueur or not. – Chip Bennett Apr 11 '11 at 16:59
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Version tags are indeed a problem. I can imagine some limited cases where it would be useful to tag a question with a version number, but the majority of questions currently don't need that tag.

We already discussed this before, with the suggestion to change the [wordpress-] prefix to a [version-] prefix, and being stricter with these tags, but this was not (yet) executed. Perhaps it is time to ask this again, now that we "graduated" to a public site?

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Yup, thumb sucking and childish minor version tagging is for toddlers! – Michal Mau Feb 20 '11 at 14:24
I'm glad we solved this here, as other communities are in danger of repeating past mistakes: meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/92053/… – Jeff Atwood♦ May 21 '11 at 5:04
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Don't know about the others, but <wordpress-3> has to go. It's not WordPress 3, it's WordPress 3.0.

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Normally, I would say that it's merely my own pedantry that causes my dislike for the term WordPress 3; however, it's more than that. Hearing someone - especially alleged "experts" - use the term implies that the speaker has no connection whatsoever to the WordPress development cycle. – Chip Bennett Apr 11 '11 at 17:02
up vote 1 down vote

It seems that you're experiencing the same issues I have administering SharePoint Overflow. We use major version tags.

For most products, this version number is really important. A lot changes between major versions so answerers will often ask the OP this again and again on so many questions. So perhaps it makes sense to have a tag for version to minimise this.

However, when/if we make it through the Area 51 commit phase (sorry, shameless plug) and migrate to Stack Exchange, we may want the platform to force users to add additional tags besides just version, to avoid the problem Thomas mentions. I'm often editing questions with just the version tag and no tags describing content.

Now, another way of looking at this is to forget about versions and encourage users to answer questions based on what they know of the platform. So if there is one way to do it in WordPress 2 and another way in WordPress 3, then answerers should describe both (if they know) and make the difference clear. This goes towards one question being the resource to solve a problem. Otherwise you could end up with questions like "How do I do XYZ in WordPress 2" and "How do I do XYZ in WordPress 3" or some other form of noise. This will just make content harder to find.

If this community is just getting started, I'd lean towards the latter.

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An interesting distinction is probably that there is no long term support for WordPress, so when you do any development (either creating or updating a site), you upgrade to the latest version. So there is less need to keep old solutions in mind. – Jan Fabry Feb 17 '11 at 21:06
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the general advice I give is to avoid version tags unless you strongly believe that the question is broken without the version tag. Version tags can be really dangerous if they are added to every question for no reason, and become an expectation -- then they're just noise. – Jeff Atwood♦ Feb 19 '11 at 0:59
hmmm, this reared its ugly head again. Pushing for policy: meta.sharepoint.stackexchange.com/questions/142/… – Jeff Atwood♦ May 21 '11 at 5:05

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