It seems to me that "convert" is an ImageMagick component, but most questions tagged (1,945 questions) deal with various conversions of various formats into other formats.

Shouldn't the noun (2,926 questions) be used for such questions (even if IMO it does not categorize a question well), and questions be retagged (1,109 questions)?

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6 Answers

up vote 4 down vote accepted

and should both be abolished. They can't stand on their own, no one in their right mind would follow either one, and they're too ambiguous to be useful.

The convert utility is one of many ImageMagick utilities. If the utility needs its own tag (which it might, there are 42 questions tagged imagemagick and convert, that tag should be . These could be fixed in short order if someone with more rep than I would create the tag.

However, when browsing a random selection of questions tagged , I found that none of my random reading of a couple hundred question titles (save the 42 that were also tagged ) were about the tool. Instead, they all followed the pattern specified by the tag wiki:

The act of changing one thing into another. Often accomplished by casting or using a method that takes one thing and outputs another.

This is a meta tag, and it needs to be burninated. Along with its partner in crime, .

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I think the convert tag should be scrapped entirely.

  • Yes, the main ImageMagick executable is named convert. But using this as a tag is completely pointless - I can think of no scenario where convert would be a meaningful categorization for a ImageMagick question. (I am an ImageMagick user and know what I'm talking about.)

  • In a general context, convert is about as meaningful as problem or write.

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Agree with accepted answer, both tags have been..

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I was about to duplicate this request, so I'll post the question here as an answer instead. Take it as my support for getting rid of this tag, but not necessarily replacing it with "imagemagick":

There's a tag which, judging by the question list, is used for converting anything to anything.


I question the usefulness of such a generic tag, and it seems any of these questions would mean the same thing without it, but it's currently attached to 2200 questions.

The tag wiki says:

The act of changing one thing into another.


There's also the sister tag, which seems to suffer from the same uselessness.

The act or an instance of converting or the process of being converted (changed in form, character, or function).

Then there are some more useful ones, like , which I think should be preferred, but they just don't seem to share the popularity of the more generic tags.

I think we should blacklist one or both of these tags, "convert/conversion", or at least merge them.

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thanks for the bump, this is now complete –  Jeff Atwood Feb 29 '12 at 10:27
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User may use convert or conversion tag for any question related to conversion like converting C code to C++ or .Net to Java cause every user is not fluent in English. We have to accept such things. And I think there is nothing wrong in using convert tag for your question even if it is not related to ImageMagic. User can also use it in question related to ImageMagic.

So your proposal of changing convert tag to ImageMagic is not a good one [As per my opinion.].

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I don't know of ImageMagick, so I didn't know that Convert is a component there. I beleive there are many more that also don't know this.

Also the word "convert" is too much in use in other contexts to be owned by ImageMagick. If you have a question that targets the Convert component in ImageMagick, you should tag the question with both convert and imagemagick.

I might change my opinion to tag it as instead of two separate tags, as just would be too generic (and as the OP says, most questions tagged deal with various conversions of various formats into other formats).

When you enter a tag name for the question, you automatically gets a list of proposals, and if you enter "convert", you will get a proposal for if there exists such tag.

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I agree that there are probably many who don't know about the ImageMagick component, but I strongly disagree that "you should tag the question with both convert and imagemagick. Each tag should stand on its own. I could support an imagemagick-convert tag, but not a policy of paring tags. –  Kevin Vermeer Nov 9 '11 at 12:50
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