When we built our tag system, back in March, we figured it would be a good idea to classify based on the science(s) that could answer the question:
I suggest that all questions should be tagged with the field of science it belongs to: psychology questions get the psychology tag, questions which require knowledge of chemistry get the chemistry tag, etc.
It works great for most questions. Unfortunately, there are questions that fall under no specific kind of knowledge. Take Do air-conditioners need a 3 minute break after being started or stopped? as an example. It only current tag is [machines], which is currently applied to two other questions, and is quite a silly tag. I cannot think of a significantly tag to apply to this question. [air-conditioners], perhaps, but that would make it quite an useless tag. That's if it isn't purged in six months.
When you look close to it, most of the main offenders are questions about some of technological device. That's where the technology tag comes in.
Currently, the technology tag is heavily underused, being applied on only 35 questions. In reality, it could be applied to quite a large quantity of questions: questions about computers, cars, bar codes, airplanes, etc. If we started using more, a great dealof orphan question would suddenly have their own category tag.
The potential downside is, of course, how widely used that tag could end up being. In the end, would we still have an useful tag? From the looks of it, yes. [cars] has 50 question. [computers] has 36. [internet] has 25. [television] has 22. [aviation] has 20. If we add these tags together and assume we're not counting one question twice (unlikely), we end up at 188. That would make it close to our second most used tag, [nutrition], which is applied to 192 different questions but it wouldn't be monstrous either.
Thus, I would suggest we apply the technology tag to more questions. The alternative is that it's a meta-tag, but I don't think that's the case. A more generic tag is required to catalog the technologies which don't have as many myths about them.
