Updating openlayers, openlayers-2 and openlayers-3 tags?

Question

Please perform the following gis.stackexchange.com retagging actions:

1. Merge the openlayers and openlayers-2 tags into openlayers-2
2. Rename openlayers-3 to openlayers

This means that in the future, even when there will be an OpenLayers with major version 4,5,6,..., all OpenLayers questions should be tagged openlayers.

Justification:

Currently, gis.stackexchange.com has the tags openlayers, openlayers-2 and openlayers-3. "OpenLayers 3" has been rebranded to simply "OpenLayers", to make it easier to switch to semantic versioning in the future.

When OpenLayers 2 was still more widely used than OpenLayers 3, openlayers-2 was introduced. Both openlayers and openlayers-2 have since been used for OpenLayers 2 questions, but were never made synonyms.

With that in mind, it makes sense to get rid of the openlayers-3 tag, use openlayers as tag for all contemporary OpenLayers questions, and openlayers-2 for questions about old OpenLayers 2.

Answer 1

OpenLayers questions currently have three tags stored:

• openlayers with 2711 questions which I think are mostly about OpenLayers 2. I think this number is only extractable using a mod tool. Some of these are expected to be about OpenLayers 3, which is due to them being asked before the Q&A on Should openlayers-2 and openlayers be synonyms?
• openlayers-2 with 626 questions and I think these should be all about OpenLayers 2
• openlayers-3 with 1412 questions and I think these should be all about OpenLayers 3. You will probably see 4123 questions because of the synonym between openlayers and openlayers-3.

When someone tries to tag a question as openlayers currently it will default to openlayers-3 which is the position reached by the Q&A of Is it time to make [openlayers] tag synonym of [openlayers-3] instead of [openlayers-2]?

It will be very easy to achieve what you propose using these steps in this order :

1. Remove the synonymy between openlayers and openlayers-3
2. Merge openlayers with openlayers-2 without creating a synonym from openlayers to openlayers-2 (the mod tool used to do this has that as an option). For the small number that may be about OpenLayers 3 rather than 2 we should just "fix 'em as we find 'em" rather than proposing a retagging campaign.
3. Merge openlayers-3 with openlayers with a synonym from openlayers-3 to openlayers (so that openlayers-3 does not resurrect). This performs a rename.

I think both the current tagging or your proposed tagging can work well so I am ambivalent as to which is used but I always like to defer to the top answerers of questions in a tagging group when changing how they are tagged.

I think an upvote on this answer should indicate endorsement of what you propose.

Answer 2

I think this method will be messy when there is an ol4 tag (actually, it is already being, given the change from ol2 to ol3).

I propose using one tag for openlayers and users would specify version (if needed) in the body; just as it is done with qgis in most questions. This way, managing the tag along time is tractable and there is no need to perform massive retags.

This has an interesting advantage in the long term that is facilitating users escalating to tag gold badges which extends the moderator tools for such users, helping to keep the site clean and organized.