I noticed an issue this morning with the tag for grids. It appears the excerpt was too long and was being truncated when viewed on the tags page or with a mouseover. While the full text began with "Use the raster
tag for questions about raster datasets" and went on with a definition, the truncation was behaving abnormally in my opinion and cutting off the first few words (perhaps by design on the site, but this goes against any convention I'm aware of). The result was the tag description began with "for questions about raster datasets" which is pretty much the opposite of what it was supposed to mean.
I proposed an edit wherein I put the actual tag meaning up front and moved the 'for something else use other tag' at the end, but I fear the damage is already done (be it as a result of the above or otherwise). There are 198 questions using grids, which is master to a synonym of grid. However a number of those questions appear to be about raster datasets and have nothing to do with reference grids or graticules as the original Wiki stated. My proposed edit added a couple of examples and tried to maintain the distinction that grids was not for raster datasets. I even added a line about the esri-grid-format, though I wonder if other non-raster, text-based 'grid files' are being left out in some way.
It was then that I also noted the grids-graticules tag which currently has 12 questions and is master to synonym graticule. Its Wiki indicates that it was created (apparently a couple of weeks ago) to distinguish between use of grid for reference vs data structure.
So now we have two different tags, with a potentially good distinction, but their Wikis define them as the same thing. And the more used tag has a great number of misapplications per its Wiki. So the questions are:
- Should the grids Wiki be updated to remove the restrictions to reference/graticule only (in which case wouldn't it just be a synonym of raster, so maybe change it to 'grids-file' to be consistent/differentiated from the other one) and those questions that do adhere to that definition be updated to use the newer grids-graticules?
- Should grids-graticules be eliminated in favor of keeping only grids and its current Wiki definition?
- Should there be an effort to go through those 198 questions currently using grids and correct them to reflect whichever of the two options above are taken? In other words, retag the ones needing it to raster, and leave only those using reference/graticule contexts (along with other suitable edits of course, if any can be made)?
- Are there other formats that would not fit the definition of raster or might require their own special tag like the esri-grid-format, or does Esri get claim to GRID (I'll use capitalization to differentiate) as a data format and others even if they're text based but not true Esri format (is there such a thing?) are... what? Rasters? Grids? I note Esri's is cited as being proprietary in binary format but open in ASCII format.
- On the subject of fishnets I've also just discovered vector-grid we can throw into the equation.
grids
and then made both grid and grids synonyms of grids-graticules. I hope I got this close to 100% right but, if not, hopefully a handful of retags can sort out the remainder.