Make tags [mapping] and [read mapping] synonyms

Question

The topic of read mapping is a sufficiently distinct subset of the more general class of sequence alignment topics to warrant a dedicated tag. However, we should collapse mapping and read-mapping as synonyms.

Answer 1

Yes, having both mapping and read-mapping for the same thing doesn't make sense. However, instead of making them synonyms, I would suggest we only keep read-mapping and get rid of mapping altogether.

In general, tags whose meaning isn't clear from the tag are bad tags. In fact, mapping is a classic example of a meta tag. Briefly, meta tags are those that:

1. If the tag can’t work as the only tag on a question, it’s probably a meta-tag. Every tag you use should be able to work, more or less, as the only tag on a question. Meta-tags, like [beginner], [subjective], and [best-practices], are useless by themselves — they tell you nothing at all about the content of the question.

2. If the tag commonly means different things to different people, it’s probably a meta-tag. In a cruel, ironic twist, the meaning of the tag [subjective] itself … is actually subjective. Ditto for [best-practices] and [beginner]. Best practices to whom? Beginner by what criteria? These tags are impossible to define by anything remotely resembling an objective metric. In comparison, the the meaning of tags like [java], [c#], and [javascript] are crystal clear to all but the nuttiest of nutbags.

As user172818 pointed out in the comments, the term "mapping" has different meanings in different subfields. Therefore, "mapping" by itself doesn't tell us anything useful about the question; it needs to be combined with another tag (ngs, reads or whatever) in order to be informative. Therefore, it is not a useful tag and should just be removed.

The simplest way to remove tags is to just edit the questions that have them. If no questions are tagged with a given tag, the tag will be deleted from the system automatically. If, in future, we see the tag returning, we can ask for it to be blacklisted.

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Since there were only 6 or so questions tagged with mapping, I went through them retagged those that were about read-mapping accordingly. However, this question:

probeset to probeset mappings between Affymetrix arrays

is about mapping between different types of affymetrix arrays. Here, I removed mapping and created a new tag affymetrix-arrays. I don't think it would be worth creating something as specific as affymetrix-array-mapping or similar.

The others were all about read-mapping and are now tagged accordingly. The mapping should now disappear and I suggest we let it fade into oblivion.