I alluded to an alternative to the proposal in my question, in an 18 month old comment on http://meta.gis.stackexchange.com/questions/3914/should-openlayers-2-and-openlayers-be-synonyms:
With mod privileges synonymizing is easy, merge is too, but burnination needs much more justification and SE involvement so I would perhaps suggest synonym initially, and assuming it works for us, then merge a little later. Burnination is probably overkill - we have only used that for gis, geospatial and spatial [and arcgis] so far.
Instead of simply switching the OpenLayers synonym from OpenLayers 2 to OpenLayers 3, I think it would be better to use these steps:
- Merge openlayers into openlayers-2 with the latter being the master
- Break (or don't make - it's a checkbox in the mod tool for merging) the synonymy between openlayers and openlayers-2
- Make a synonym from openlayers to openlayers-3
Burnination of openlayers to eliminate the need for step 3 is possible but I think overkill.
The above 3 steps would mean that when anyone tries to tag a question as openlayers it will be assumed they meant openlayers-3, which I think seems reasonable today and until OpenLayers 4 starts to pervade.