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  1. There are 78 questions tagged with or which are also tagged .

  2. There are 26 questions tagged with and . Five of those questions are also tagged .

  3. Therefore, 99 questions may be over-tagged depending on the usefulness of the tags for the question and whether the question relates to the US.

  4. For comparison, there are 274 questions tagged with or which are not tagged . Not all of those are for the US.

Should the [congress] tag be omitted when referring specifically to the [house-of-representatives] or the [senate]?

When referring to both the [house-of-representatives] and the [senate], should only the [congress] tag be used?

There being only 5 tags available for a question, freeing a tag would allow adding other tags, particularly, the [united-states] tag for some questions at the 5 tag limit.

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    Why would you suggest that both tags not be used?
    – Joe W
    Commented Aug 27, 2021 at 17:33
  • @JoeW - There are only 5 tags available. I've noticed a "disturbing" tendency for some to drop the [united-states] tag when asking questions related to the US. Freeing a tag would allow adding the [united-states] tag.
    – Rick Smith
    Commented Aug 27, 2021 at 17:42
  • Wouldn't that be good information to include in the question? I wasn't gathering that some tags are getting dropped because of the 5 tag limit based on what you asked.
    – Joe W
    Commented Aug 27, 2021 at 17:47
  • @JoeW - Of the 3 tags noted, there are over 30 questions that do not have the [united-states] tag. Only a few are at the 5 tag limit. There are literally a few hundred questions related to the US that are missing the [united-states] tag. Some of those are also at the 5 tag limit; but, for this question, I wanted to limit the consideration to the use of those tags. The question of the missing tag for US questions is a topic for another day.
    – Rick Smith
    Commented Aug 27, 2021 at 18:07
  • I understand that now, but can't you edit that into the question so that it is more clear why this is an issue?
    – Joe W
    Commented Aug 27, 2021 at 18:08
  • Are there experts in "senates"? Are there people that follow only questions about senates or upper houses but not HoRs or lower houses? It seems like a bit of an over-specification especially when, as you point out, they would always be tagged with a country and a legislature tag (I imagine you could have the same issue with UK/parliament/HoL). If there's a question about the systems generally they could be tagged "bicameralism" or maybe just "congress" vs. "parliament"?
    – Azor Ahai -him-
    Commented Sep 2, 2021 at 21:06
  • @AzorAhai-him- Are there people that follow only questions about senates or upper houses but not HoRs or lower houses? Watchers: Congress - 3, Senate - 2, House... - 0, Parliament - 11. The question is about using more tags than necessary and leaving out relevant, potentially useful, tags. A similar case occurs with using a party tag and the [parties] tag (24 questions).
    – Rick Smith
    Commented Sep 2, 2021 at 21:27
  • Then yes - it does seem unnecessary to tag questions with both a legislature and a house tag.
    – Azor Ahai -him-
    Commented Sep 2, 2021 at 21:30

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One example of a fully loaded tag set is a question about the House and Senate rules regarding the impeachment of a US president that could use eight tags. These would include:

Note that having used five relevant tags, there is no room for the last set of tags. The absence of those tags does not prevent such a question from being found, since a search using , , will locate the question.

There are 31 30 questions tagged or that do not include any of , or . (Two tags were also excluded to remove questions unrelated to the US.)

I did tag (and other) edits on six questions. Four to add relevant tags, one with no effect on tags, and one to remove a tag that reduced the count. In each case and IMO, the questions are well-tagged without tags for the House, Senate or Congress. (Though some other tags are questionable and I ignored minor edits.)

Seven of the above questions are missing . None of those had five tags.

While I did not review those 156 questions, some containing seemingly redundant tags did reach the five tag limit.

The is no search type for the number of tags. Trying to find a good case for not having redundant tags would require a scattershot approach; nonetheless keeping redundancy to a minimum may be beneficial.

I have posted a question: How can I limit search results to questions with exactly five tags?, on Meta StackExchange to see it there is a way to do this.

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