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In the latest days I've seen a stream of suggested edits among which several only added a tag, often new or seldomly used, describing the model of aircraft mentioned in the question.

Do we need this?

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Yes, I would like to have tags per aircraft type, when a question is specific to a particular aircraft type. Some people are specifically interested in a type of aircraft, and it makes it easier to find (and subscribe to!) questions about that type. It's especially relevant for questions to find someone with good knowledge of the type. Other sites have similar tags, e.g. phone models on Android Enthusiasts, games on Arqade; and on the whole people find them useful.

I don't think we need to go down to different variants though (e.g. 747-200). There's such a thing as being too specific.

That said, we shouldn't have a huge effort of backfilling tags onto old questions. Making a large number of edits in a short term is very disruptive, it creates extra unnecessary work for reviewers (it takes more time to review the edit than make it!), and it screws up the front page.

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    $\begingroup$ Definitely don’t go down to the model of the series. “B747-series” is a more than adequate tag for the B747-200. $\endgroup$
    – Notts90
    Dec 6, 2017 at 15:26
  • $\begingroup$ What about just "Boeing" or "Airbus"? Do we even need to get model specific? $\endgroup$
    – Lnafziger
    Dec 11, 2017 at 4:33
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    $\begingroup$ @Lnafziger Again relating to the example from Android: we have manufacturer as well as model tags. It's useful sometimes, but questioners often don't know if their question is phone-specific or manufacturer-specific. That seems like it would be less common for us, but might still catch out ones like aviation.stackexchange.com/q/39634/998 (which is already tagged A320 but is not type-specific at all) $\endgroup$
    – Dan Hulme
    Dec 11, 2017 at 8:34
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    $\begingroup$ Oh, I get that, but is it really necessary? Are we looking for A320 experts or Airbus experts most of the time? If we get too narrow, especially with a relative small community, then the experts may not be following every individual tag, especially since they will most likely be low volume. $\endgroup$
    – Lnafziger
    Dec 12, 2017 at 18:26
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Since I recently created the following tags

  • [2 followers, 2 questions]
  • [2 followers, 3 questions]
  • [2 followers, 5 questions]
  • [2 followers, 5 questions]
  • [2 followers, 4 questions]
  • [2 followers, 1 question]

I assume that this question is partly motivated by my recent activity. Obviously, I follow all of these tags, which means that for each of the aforementioned tags there is one other follower.

In an ideal world, searching for "X-29" on Aviation Stack Exchange would produce all questions and answers on the Grumman X-29. Unfortunately, such a search also produces results on the MiG-29. To make matters worse, some people write "F4" instead of "F-4". Thus, I did create tags for specific aircraft, so that I could

  • quickly and efficiently find questions and answers on specific aircraft

  • subscribe to and be notified by email whenever there are new questions on specific aircraft

which would allow me to minimize the use of the search functionality in the future.

I belatedly apologize for the disruption this tag-creation and editing of old posts may have caused. I am most active on Mathematics Stack Exchange, whose frontpage can change entirely in less than 1 hour. I now realize Aviation Stack Exchange's frontpage is updated at a much slower rate.

Since I wholeheartedly agreed with Dan Hulme's answer when I read it days ago, I did not post an answer sooner, for I thought it would have been redundant. A recent message from the moderators encouraged me to write this answer.

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    $\begingroup$ Thank you for taking the time to answer. As we mentioned, we appreciate the intent, it's the execution that left us with a bit of uneasiness, as also the other meta post shows. Please drop by in chat anytime to discuss possible ways to go forward. $\endgroup$
    – Federico
    Dec 11, 2017 at 17:58
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I think, that it would be best to adapt a scheme, where there are both tags for models/model series as well as specific model versions/blocks/revisions.

This would allow a general question to be limited by model, and a detail question about a specific block of a model to be limited down to a block.

This would be interesting for identification, because often blocks can be hard to discern from one another.

More specific questions ask for more specific tags.

Example: We have the F-16 fighter. There are a lot of versions of it. general tag: F-16
more specific, variant: F-16E/F
block tag: F-16 Block 60

So someone asks a general question about the F-16, it just gets the normal tag. Someone asks about the indian "Super Viper" version of it, it would get a block 70 tag too, because that version is based on the block 70. (Some F-16 variants are based on more than one block)

I think it is important to get it down as detailed as possible; engines, equipment, performance, etc can all change for one aircraft model over the course of the lifetime. This can often be a cause for confusion.

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No. There are hundreds of aircraft manufacturers with thousands of airplane models. It is useless and clutter the site.

On the other hand, there are some famous airplane models (e.g. Boeing only: 747, 777, 787) which are well known, are currently popular enough and fly a lot. I would like to search for all questions which are related to or .

When you hear F-16, you know that we are talking about General Dynamics F-16 Fighting Falcon, but should not be tag.

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    $\begingroup$ "but [j20] should not be tag" Why not? In what way, except perhaps familiarity to a US audience, is [f-16] qualitatively different from [j20]? $\endgroup$
    – user
    Dec 7, 2017 at 13:32
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    $\begingroup$ Where do you draw the line? Who decides if an airplane is "popular" enough to get a tag? Do we tell users, "sorry, I know you are asking a question specific to the J-20 but it's not popular enough for a tag"? $\endgroup$
    – fooot
    Dec 7, 2017 at 20:44
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    $\begingroup$ "Where do you draw the line?": Maybe we are looking for a solution to an unclear problem. What are the tags used for? Their main use is to find questions related to a topic. The smaller the granularity, the more difficult to write a search request based on tags. So as this answer suggests... Boeing-747 looks a good level. But it should be associated with e.g. airlines, because one may be interested in all commercial aircraft, and querying Boeing-747 or Airbus-380 or ... maybe a bit difficult. $\endgroup$
    – mins
    Dec 8, 2017 at 1:27
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    $\begingroup$ going with what @mins said, it is better "fighter", or the specific model? aviation.stackexchange.com/posts/23840/revisions (see revision 9) $\endgroup$
    – Federico
    Dec 8, 2017 at 6:04

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