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This tag is in phase 4 of the burnination process described here. The question and comments have been cleaned to allow for on-topic discussion about the burnination of this tag. Please keep it that way.

If you want to discuss the process of burnination itself, post a new question on Meta or visit the SOCVR chat room.

I recently stumbled on the tag, with no wiki and 779 questions covering a wide range of topics.

The commonality in all the questions is that users are referring to a "library", for which it is clearly a synonym/abbreviation.

Some are just mentioning the library they use. Some are (off-topic) requesting a library recommendation. Many are talking about a or or , all of which have their own tags.

However, the library tag has been blacklisted. I suspect many questions with this tag were by users attempting to use the library tag, finding none, and substituting this instead.

A previous burnination request in 2014 suggested removing ; comments indicated we should blacklist a direct synonym. The tag was created in 2017, a few years after that discussion.

1. Does it describe the contents of the questions to which it is applied? and is it unambiguous?

No.

The contents of the questions to which it is applied cover a wide range of topics, all of which use (or the user is requesting) a particular library, but are many different libraries (or the process of importing libraries, etc.). In most cases, if a library-related tag is needed, should suffice.

2. Is the concept described even on-topic for the site?

The concepts or or which are on-topic have their own tags. When dealing with multiple there's a tag for that.

This tag is an easy place to find close-able questions asking for library recommendations, though. 329 of the 589 [editor's note: outdated numbers; valid at the time of writing] questions are unanswered.

3. Does the tag add any meaningful information to the post?

No. The posts mentioned a library in the question. The tag adds nothing. It's not useful for searching. Only 83 of the 589 questions have more than one upvote denoting useful questions. Sorting the tag by votes shows a few useful questions at the top of the list, none of which need the tag for their usefulness.

4. Does it mean the same thing in all common contexts?

Yes, it means a library, which was burninated in 2012 and blacklisted in 2013. Sadly it appears a single question survived this purge and came roaring back to life in 2017.

Is the tag harmful?

In a large number of questions it's one of five tags, possibly replacing a better tag. It's actively being (mis)used, with 6 questions tagged thus this week, 16 this month. At 588 (surviving) questions since January 2017, that's an average of 10.5 per month.

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  • 1
    Comparing some of the oldest "newest" and "active" questions, looks like the tag was created on this question about iOS (Jan 14 '17). The question you linked got the tag added on Jan 29 '21 instead.
    – Andrew T.
    Commented Sep 6, 2021 at 21:16
  • 9
    [frameworks] also has the same problem.
    – Donald Duck
    Commented Sep 7, 2021 at 10:55
  • 3
    I think the lib tag should be removed. It is irksome that there are so many questions with the tag — it makes the effort of removing it that much harder.
    – Jonathan Leffler
    Commented Sep 7, 2021 at 17:53
  • Since it doesn't add useful information, a moderator could just delete the tag, no need to edit all those questions manually.
    – Cris Luengo
    Commented Sep 8, 2021 at 15:26
  • @CrisLuengo bad tags typically have a lot of bad questions too that either need to be cleaned up, or that should be closed and in many cases deleted. Doing that is part of why the normal burnination process includes human review of all questions. Mass tag removal is only for exceptional cases where human review in impractical due to the number of questions involved. Even there questions with only the bad tag need addressed first.
    – Dan Is Fiddling By Firelight
    Commented Sep 8, 2021 at 15:54
  • 1
    @DanIsFiddlingByFirelight I understand burnination is good excuse to review some potentially bad questions, but you could also just sit there and look at random old questions and make decisions about them. I mean, reviewing the questions with this tag is not strictly necessary. I can think of better ways to waste time.
    – Cris Luengo
    Commented Sep 8, 2021 at 15:57
  • 1
    @CrisLuengo sadly, the tool to do that isn't exposed to moderators. Only staff.
    – Braiam
    Commented Sep 8, 2021 at 18:16
  • 7
    Wait, there is a libraries tag?
    – Didier L
    Commented Sep 8, 2021 at 22:44
  • This tag is still around — there have been six questions in the last 7 days, all unanswered. I came across it once more because of a new question. I'm not sure what it takes to get this burnination request moving. Do we simply have to do it manually? WIth 63 upvotes and 6 downvotes on this question, it is clear that the majority of the people who've considered the issue agree it should be removed.
    – Jonathan Leffler
    Commented Oct 14, 2022 at 5:52
  • 1
    Note that there is also the unix-ar tag for questions about managing libraries with the Unix ar utility — those are static libraries. It is not an active tag; the last question was asked more than a year ago. It was at one time the ar tag, but the augmented reality people ended up coopting (dominating) that tag, which is now a synonym of augmented-reality.
    – Jonathan Leffler
    Commented Jun 26 at 20:01
  • Huh, this tag is still used? Seemed like a pretty clear cut one to ditch.
    – Steve Bennett
    Commented Jun 27 at 0:47
  • Unlike lib, library did potentially add something meaningful to the question. When used in combination with another tag, it may clarify what the question is about. Not the best tag for sure, but I don't really see what harm it was doing. There's so many different forms of libraries in the context of programming, that a better tag doesn't necessarily exist in all contexts.
    – Lundin
    Commented Jun 27 at 9:14

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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Observations/Retag Guidance:

  • Questions about static or shared libraries can be tagged or respectively
    • For Windows-specific questions, there's also for shared libraries
  • Questions about specific standard libraries can either be tagged with an stdlib-specific tag if it exists, or just with an applicable language tag
  • Questions about linkers should be tagged with the relevant compiler, and
    • For questions about GCC's ld, can also be used
      • Note that some questions tagged aren't about GCC; but linkers in general, and should be tagged instead, if no other linker-specific tags exist
    • ld should not be confused with the UNIX utility ldd, which should be tagged instead

Progress:

The tag is in the process of being burninated. You can help out by reviewing the questions with this tag, and...

  • editing questions to improve the question and remove the tag (retag-only edits are best left to users with full edit privileges; i.e. > 2k reputation),
  • flagging/voting to close questions that are duplicates/off-topic/unclear/too broad/opinion-based (users with < 3k reputation can help quite a bit by flagging questions for closure, which helps keep the Close Vote Review Queue full),
  • filtering for questions with this tag in the Close Vote Queue,
  • voting on questions with this tag,
  • voting to delete the questions with this tag (after they have been closed, and only if the entire Q&A contains nothing of value). However, keep in mind that at the end of the burnination process all closed questions containing this tag will be deleted semi-automatically. Thus, there's rarely a need to vote to delete these questions.

Here are some quick links to get you started:

Track the progress of burnination

Remember that burnination is a clean-up effort!

Salvage whatever possible by editing and re-tagging.

We don't want to destroy value, so salvaging a post should be your first priority. If a question can be saved, please edit it. Your edit should improve all problems with the question and remove the tag, possibly replacing it with another tag, as described above in "Observations/Retag Guidance". (Edits, specially re-tags, are best left to users with full edit privileges)

Unsalvageable questions should just be flagged/voted for closure. They don't need to be retagged.

If the question is not appropriate for this site, then don't worry about removing the tag—just flag/vote to close the question.

At the end of the burnination process, all questions which still have the tag should have been closed. These will be mass-deleted, which will remove the tag from the system automatically, with minimal disruption.

Ask for help if you need it.

If you have any questions about specific questions you come across, or the process in general, please feel free to leave a comment on this post. You can also drop into the SOCVR chat room for real-time advice and discussion.

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  • It appears that the progress tracker link is not being updated over the weekend, or maybe just not being updated at all. At any rate, when I view what it says, it says there are (still) 775 questions to be processed, and that no activity occurred up until a few hours short of the end of 2024-06-28 (Friday), and the display shows 2024-06-29 and 2024-06-30 on the horizontal axis, but no data for it. I've processed some Q&A — there should be fewer to process unless an evil bot is tagging questions to make up for those I've untagged.
    – Jonathan Leffler
    Commented 2 days ago
  • Yeah, it's out of quota for some reason, so it hasn't been updating
    – Zoe Mod
    Commented 2 days ago
  • Progress tracker looks broken. No updates after 2024-06-27.
    – talex
    Commented 2 days ago
  • I've just come across the .a tag for Unix static libraries (148 questions). 🙁 Not sure whether this should be a synonym for static-libraries or unix-ar or something else, or whether it should be burninated.
    – Jonathan Leffler
    Commented yesterday
  • Just an FYI — this Q&A refers to the shared-library tag and so on, using the singular. Those names are (now) synonyms for the plural tags such as shared-libraries.
    – Jonathan Leffler
    Commented 23 hours ago
  • There's a [dll] tag, so .a is probably fine. Should probably be renamed to something slightly less ambiguous (there are other things using the .a extension)
    – Zoe Mod
    Commented 22 hours ago
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I agree with the proposal — the tag should be burninated. Where it makes sense, questions should be retagged with one of the more specific library-type tags:

2
  • I expect one more tag appears; lib is also a tool for making .lib files which are static libraries.
    – Joshua
    Commented Jun 27 at 17:50
  • Preemptively create visual-studio-lib-tool, perhaps? Or lib.exe?
    – XML
    Commented yesterday

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