Should we start merging duplicate tags?

Question

I noticed while scrolling through the list of existing tags that weight, weight-loss, body-weight, overweight, and weight-gain all exist as separate tags, as do food-poisoning, foodborneillness, and food-safety; diagnostics, diagnosis and differential-diagnosis; allergy and allergies; medication and medications; and so on.

We're still a beta site, so I can understand how easy tag creation would result in all these duplicate tags, but in a field like health where so many people have such specific specialties, duplicate tags make it hard for the right questions to reach the right people. As, say, a psychiatrist, I'd need to know to look for questions with the tags psychology-psychology, psychiatrist-psychiatry and mental-health, which isn't too bad. A weight loss specialist on the other hand, as shown above, would be in for a surprise.

What can we do about this, and to what degree should we be stepping in?

Note: I was choosing tags for this post, and noticed tag-management, tagging and tags all as separate tags, so I did the only sensible thing and went with them all.

Answer 1

When you have 1,250 rep you'll be able to suggest tag synonyms. In the meantime, I think it's appropriate to proceed with most of these merges. The community just needs to decide which ones should be the "parent" tags. I would propose (A > B = merge A into B and remap new tags called A to B):

• weight > body-weight
• foodborneillness > food-poisoning
• allergy > allergies
• medication > medications

The rest of those seem sufficiently differentiated to warrant separate tags to me, but I'm not firmly committed to any of this.