Posts tagged do-not-use--ambiguous

Tags that are ambiguous don't help create structure in the questions organization.

They are useless because their meaning is not well defined and even in the presence of a tag guidance text they will be confusing. Therefore they will be used for wildly different fields and so won't help people searching for questions having similar topics. Many single-word tags that are also adjectives fall under this category.

As an example, consider a hypothetical tag analog. What would it be used for? Analog to Digital converters? Analog comparators? Analog switches (also known as MOSFET transmission gates)? Or just any plain analog circuit?

So, please, avoid creating tags that can have such issues.

When you create a tag you should ask yourself: Will most of the questions tagged with it have something substantial in common and still is different from other topics?

NOTE: At the moment the tag structure on this site is undergoing some heavy refactoring, so there are still tags that are ambiguous and that shouldn't be used on new questions. If you go to the tags page, many of them have 0 questions or miss a tag usage guidance text, so this is a strong hint that you shouldn't use them (alas this is not a hard rule, since there are some tags that are OK, but still miss a guidance text, so use your best judgement).