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It's not clear to me that the tag provides any usefulness in filtering questions right now. Currently its use seems quite synonomous with , another tag with concerns.

I think the diet tag has potential for grouping questions that ask about more specific dietary patterns that exist within the umbrella of vegan and vegetarian diets. For example we have fruitarians, raw vegans, locavores, followers of whole food plant-based, and low-carb high-fat vegans.

However, most questions currently carrying the diet tag are not about dietary patterns that provide additional guidance beyond the basic tenets of veganism or vegetarianism.

I propose three possible strategies going forward, and welcome discussion of other strategies.

1. Burninate the tag

The diet tag is currently used on 52 questions but offers very little filtering value on those questions. There are many questions where the addition of this tag doesn't add any qualifying information that go beyond the premise of the site and there are many related/similar questions not carrying the tag. Because of this, it might make sense to eliminate the tag entirely and instead encourage the use of tags that refer to specific diet patterns, for example:

2. Give the tag a specific meaning

If we don't like the idea of having tags for each diet pattern as described in #1 then it seems like the diet tag would be great for all questions about those specific dietary patterns. But in order for the tag to have meaning, it would need to be stripped from a couple dozen unrelated questions, for example:

If we were to remove the diet tag from these questions, we would likely want to add more relevant tags in their place.

3. Synonomize with

This option was suggested by @NogShine in chat. This would best reflect the current usage, since most questions carrying the diet tag are about food. I could only find a couple counter-examples:

I feel like selecting this option would depend on first making a decision on Is the [food] tag too greedy, or should it eat even more?.

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We should burninate and blacklist the tag.

We already have a great selection of tags for questions about different lifestyles/diet patterns.

I originally thought that the diet tag could be useful as an umbrella for all of these related tags, but I have since come to believe that parent tags can be problematic. If we look to StackOverflow for guidance, we see that [programming-languages] is not used as an umbrella for questions about java, php, or python. Instead, it's reserved for cases where a specific language tag doesn't work. The set of diet patterns is small and well understood, and we don't need to keep a parent tag around to help with discovery.

What should we do with all these questions?

If the question is about a specific diet pattern or lifestyle (it describes a plan for all the food a person eats) then use a specific tag describing that pattern. These questions are about specific diet patterns.

If the question is about suitability of particular foods for a particular diet, consider adding one of these tags in addition to the tag for the diet pattern in question.

If the question is about a specific food, use the tag. These questions are recognizable because specific foods can be a part of multiple diet patterns. For example, questions about apples aren't specific to any particular group of vegetarians.

If the question is about dieting (eating less to lose weight) use the tag.

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