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Especially with aviation related acronyms it is commonplace to see them in capitals. Tags do not allow this:

IMHO it makes it harder to read than VOR or IFE. It clearly distinguishes an acronym from a word and it makes using the site easier. It would also come across as more professional I think. Don't know if this is possible but it would be great if it was (perhaps a site setting?)

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  • $\begingroup$ In addition to the reasons you mentioned, tags like faa-regulations will also benefit if this change is implemented. $\endgroup$
    – Farhan Mod
    Jun 10, 2015 at 13:52
  • $\begingroup$ @Farhan In that case, mixed case would be better. I believe that the developers can switch them to ALL capital letters for us, but I remember reading that mixed case is not an option with their current system. $\endgroup$
    – Lnafziger
    Jun 10, 2015 at 16:41
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    $\begingroup$ There's surprisingly little on meta.SE, suggesting that most people don't mind this behavior, but see this question $\endgroup$
    – Pondlife
    Jun 11, 2015 at 19:31

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I couldn't find any particular reason that tags are always lowercase, but as a practical matter, they go a long way to ensuring consistancy. Tags are the foundation of a site's folksonomy. In order to prevent redundant and competing tags such as [FAA-Regulations] vs. [FAA-regulations]. Normalizing to lowercase () prevents those sorts of (usually accidental) duplications. We can solve this problem with synonyms, but these take work to maintain and it's not immediately clear which form should be prefered.

It's important to note that this also enforces a degree of consistency across sites. For instance, is shared among many sites. There are other ways this could be achieved, of course, but this was not explicitly part of the plan when tags were designed.

The other consideration, of course, is that standardizing on lowercase tag names helps streamline the code for tag processing. I have no hard data on what it would take to implement mixed-case tags, but I guess it would be substantial.

Finally, I feel your pain.

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  • $\begingroup$ The technical obstacles are (at least superficially) pretty low hurdles to clear - make all the tag-name comparisons case-insensitive in whatever manner you wish -- things get a little hairier inserting and curating tags in the database though (if a tag was incorrectly capitalized on creation how do you "fix" it?) and the easy fix for that is probably storing a "display name" along with each canonical tag name (which offends even my hackish sensibilities) :) $\endgroup$
    – voretaq7
    Jun 19, 2015 at 1:46
  • $\begingroup$ I was actually thinking of a "display" version -vs- the always lower case version as well. It does make the comparisons easier, and nothing would need to be changed in that portion of the code.. $\endgroup$
    – Lnafziger
    Jun 22, 2015 at 18:36

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