These guidelines are offered to assist GIS SE users to tag and find categories of ArcGIS questions consistently.
ArcGIS is a huge platform of software and over many years the most generic arcgis tag was first burninated and then blacklisted - see What to do with ArcGIS tag after burnination?. When no more specific alternatives are available, an appropriate tag for generic ArcGIS platform questions is arcgis-platform.
The case for doing this is now history:
In the early days of GIS Stack Exchange the use of a generic arcgis tag made sense because:
- There were far fewer ArcGIS questions so opening each one tagged arcgis to find out if it was for Desktop, Server, Online or something else was not so onerous
- ArcGIS was more or less synonymous with ArcGIS Desktop, and Esri were not actively seeking to synonymize ArcGIS with ArcGIS Online
- There were far fewer specialists available to answer and wanting to focus on a subset of the ArcGIS Platform
As ArcGIS Online and ArcGIS Pro questions increase it becomes clear that arcgis commonly means different things to different people, so it has the hallmarks of a meta-tag.
Fortunately, explicit tags are already available for most, hopefully all, of the main products and applications that make up the ArcGIS platform e.g.
- ArcGIS Desktop – arcgis-desktop may or may not be phased out in favour of tags for its applications - see voting at Re-tagging to de-emphasize ArcGIS Desktop product in favour of its applications? - the five applications are indented below
- ArcGIS Pro - arcgis-pro
- ArcMap - arcmap
- ArcCatalog - arccatalog
- ArcGlobe - arcglobe
- ArcScene - arcscene
- ArcGIS for Server – arcgis-server
- ArcGIS for Mobile – arcgis-mobile
- ArcGIS Online – arcgis-online
- ArcGIS Engine – arcgis-engine
- ArcGIS Runtime – arcgis-runtime
- ArcGIS Explorer – arcgis-explorer
- Portal for ArcGIS - arcgis-portal
For an ArcGIS question I recommend always using one or more of these tags so that it shows up in the tag favourites of people who specialise in them rather than in a much bigger bucket.
ArcGIS typically has a number of versions and service packs in general use at any point in time. Recently, I do not think I have seen anything other than:
- ArcGIS 10.6 – arcgis-10.6
- ArcGIS 10.5 – arcgis-10.5
- ArcGIS 10.4 – arcgis-10.4
- ArcGIS 10.3 – arcgis-10.3
- ArcGIS 10.2 – arcgis-10.2
- ArcGIS 10.1 – arcgis-10.1
- ArcGIS 10.0 – arcgis-10.0
- ArcGIS 9.3 – arcgis-9.3
- ArcGIS 9.2 – arcgis-9.2
I suggest that including a version tag to indicate the ArcGIS version that your question is relating is often helpful. The use of version tags is independent of whether your question could apply to multiple versions or whether your problem is only present in a single version. Knowing the version you are using helps potential answerers find questions that they want to answer.
For example, when ArcGIS 10.6 was released I wanted to focus on the questions where people were starting to use that. I feel much happier volunteering my time when I can click arcgis-10.6 to see them rather than having to open and read each arcgis-desktop question containing the string "10.6" to try and determine whether 10.6 has just been mentioned incidentally or is actually the version that they are using.
ArcGIS has three license levels:
- Basic (formerly known as ArcView when applied to Desktop)
- Standard (formerly known as ArcEditor when applied to Desktop)
- Advanced (formerly known as ArcInfo when applied to Desktop)
My recommendation is that we do not encourage use of tags for these, but do not formally synonymise them. I often prefer to include such details, when relevant, in the body of the question, but others may prefer to use one of their tags.
Some other, more developer/administrator oriented, components of Esri Products are:
- ArcObjects - arcobjects
- ArcPy arcpy
- ArcGIS JavaScript API - arcgis-javascript-api
- ArcGIS Silverlight API - arcgis-silverlight-api
- ArcGIS Flex API - arcgis-flex-api
- ArcGIS REST API - arcgis-rest-api
- ArcGIS for Android - arcgis-android
- ArcSDE - arcsde
These seem to be useful - they are both focussed and frequently used.
Likewise for:
- ModelBuilder - modelbuilder
- ArcGIS 3D Analyst - 3d-analyst
The tag list above is not meant to be exhaustive, just to cover the main cases.
Some other relevant Meta Q&As (that should align with this one and vice versa) are: