What about a {hobby} tag?

Question

In my question Hobby path realization in convex hull approach I originally introduced the hobby tag. After a revision it has been removed, but I recently discovered another question, Add "tangential nodes" to a hobby curve, that re-introduced it.

Should I re-tag my question?

Answer 1

I think that Stephen's comment hits the nail on the head: would the hobby tag help someone? There are several categories to consider:

1. Someone asking a question for which the hobby package could provide an answer. But, as has been pointed out, this person might well not know that it could and, more importantly, might not really care if it could or not. It is a big thing to choose between pgf and pstricks so those are important tags, but whether an answer uses the hobby package or not is unlikely to be a deal-breaker.

2. Someone asking a question specifically about the hobby package. At the moment, this is most likely to be a cheap way of asking me about it! Since I don't take much notice of tags, a hobby tag wouldn't help here.

3. Someone who likes answering questions with the hobby package. Tags are never about answers, always questions. But even so, the number of people who are in this category is quite small and I suspect we all actively monitor the tikz-pgf tag instead.

4. Someone who's just discovered the hobby package and wonders what they could do with it. One could make this into a case for the tag, but there are other ways to find this information: searching for usetikzlibrary{hobby} for a start, or links to the original question.

So much as my vanity says "Yes, let's have a hobby tag!", my practicality thinks that it wouldn't actually bring any benefit.

On the other hand, Charles' suggestion of a more generic tag would make some sense, but then I would go for one with no fancy words (such as "spline") like "curve-fitting".

Answer 2

Some options:

1. I suggest we don't have tags for packages that rarely raise questions here, but doing so is systematic, so it's an option.
2. The package is about realising what Raph Levien calls Hobby splines, which are the innovative splines that John Hobby devised and used in Metapost (see Curve through a sequence of points with Metapost and TikZ), so we could have the concept tag hobby-splines. While this tag would be a good fit for the questions that would be given the package tag above, I don't think this tag would actually cover more questions, so it is of marginal value.
3. A more general version still, just splines, would indeed cover more questions, such as What is the "smooth" plot interpolation algorithm in pgfplots? This is my preferred option, but it raises the question of how to phrase the splines tag wiki so that it covers only the sufficiently geometric questions, and not just any of the 200+ questions to do with plotting curves. Something along the lines of "involving the choice of curve-fitting algorithm" would do the trick. The tag wiki can describe the most important splines in Tex-centric typesetting.
4. Of course, the risk of the more general concept tag is that our restrictions on its use will mean that questions about our hobby package might not be able to carry the splines tag. So a 4th option is to have both a splines concept tag and a hobby package tag, which seems obviously worse than 1.

Postscript

An afterthought: do we really want to have unvarnished "tribute" package tags like hobby at all: if I wrote a package called Knuth that, say, mapped some idiomatic Knuth Tex onto Latex, and it actually got used and had questions asked about it, would we want the knuth tag to be about my package? So I guess pgf-hobby might be better than hobby.