Pre Burnination process

Currently, when a problematic tag is reported on Meta Stack Overflow, it typically gets categorized as a burninate-request. These questions follow the now well-established (if not well-staffed...) burnination process. This process requires a lot of work and a long lead time before it can finally reach the stage of burnination, and the reality is that a lot of times these questions never reach the burnination stage at all, because that's not the right process for them. Aside from burnination, there are at least two other overarching processes that get corralled through the burnination system:

• Tag disambiguation
• Tag cleanup

These two processes sometimes end up happening during a burnination process part of the time because a proper burnination process should cover these two scenarios, and part of the time because the burnination is rejected, and only these options remain to moderate the tag on a community-wide scale. Aside from that, the burnination process itself comes with some baggage, and has been referenced a few times in important Meta discussions:

• Evaluation of SOCVR's Burnination Process
• Tag removals must be discussed and documented on Meta

What's clear from both of these threads is that the burnination process, while fairly comprehensive and well-tailored at this point to the burninating of tags, is not at all tailored or inviting for people whose real need or interest is tag disambiguation or cleanup.

It was proposed in the inaugural Trogdor meeting that we do something about this:

I almost think we need to migrate our burnination process to a prior process where we determine what step is appropriate - burnination, cleanup, disambiguation, etc. because each of those things is way different

This got some general approval, and Shog felt it was a worthwhile idea to expand upon. Thus, the initial outlines of a Pre-Burnination Process (henceforth referred to as pre-burp) are below.

The first thing to determine in the pre-burp is - what action is required? As mentioned before, this can be a disambiguation request, a tag cleanup request, or a burnination request. Arguably, some of these items necessitate others, in the order listed.

A burnination request is the most comprehensive of these actions to take, and it encompasses a potential need to disambiguate the tag in order to salvage it or any related questions that can survive separate from the tag to be burninated. It also implies a request to cleanup the tag; not all questions in a to-be-burninated tag are necessarily close-worthy, low quality, etc.; many are simply the victim of a bad tag.

A cleanup request or a disambiguation request are two that can be seen as two sides of the same coin; both are requests to curate an existing tag. While a disambiguation request is specific and has a targeted outcome, a cleanup request is more broad, and something of a catch-all for potential problem questions.

Some things that need to be determined before implementing the pre-burp:

• Which tags to consider for these processes? Is there an upper and lower threshold on question count similar to burnination requests (e.g. 1000 questions max)?
• Some requests will necessarily be declined. What should that process look like? What action(s) should be taken for tags outside those thresholds?
• Disambiguation requests are fairly common. The process for tag disambiguation should spell out some standard tag nomenclature guidelines (e.g. lang vs lang-version vs lang-year).
• How thorough should cleanup tasks be? What constitutes a finished cleanup request? Is there any reason a cleanup request should be declined?
• Question Titles - one of the smallest details is possibly one of the biggest credits to the regularity of the burnination process; the punny titles that then get transformed into "Should we burninate [tag]?" Everyone follows along because it's one of the few aspects of fun that Meta tacitly encourages. This one is not key to the process, but could be key to the adoption/survival of it.
• What kind of system features would be beneficial/critical to the success of these things? This is the stretch goal step, admittedly, but even some relatively small things like banners reminding people to stay involved can go a long way to helping fuel the pre-burp.

Now and for the foreseeable future, our resources are quite limited, and these details should be sussed out in the most flexible way possible to allow us to adapt to different levels of Meta engagement with the least amount of restructuring.