Question: Does it describe the contents of the questions to which it is applied? and is it unambiguous?
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[plugins](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/plugins "show questions tagged 'plugins'") [tag wiki](https://stackoverflow.com/tags/plugins/info):

> 
> A plug-in (or plugin) is a set of software components that adds specific abilities to a larger software application. If supported, plug-ins enable customizing the functionality of an application.
> 
> 
> 

This description doesn't give us any real reason why we should use the tag, only what a plugin is by its definition.

Is the concept described even on-topic for the site?
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While a plugin pattern could be useful for the site, most of the questions are going to be either too broad or opinion based.

Does the tag add any meaningful information to the post?
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The only information this tag adds is that the question is about a problem with a plugin, this can in most questions also be made clear by the context of the other tags invoked.

Does it mean the same thing in all common contexts?
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No, because most people use this tag for the platform/language specific plugin, while in broad sense of the meaning it is still a plugin, there are significant differences between the implementations, and therefore you cannot be a [plugins](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/plugins "show questions tagged 'plugins'") expert.

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This tag should really be burninated because it is almost always misused when any kind of plugin is involved in the question, and therefore the tag should be replaced with more specific tags or removed altogether from questions.

Answer: 
> 
> While a plugin pattern could be useful for the site, most of the questions are going to be either too broad or opinion based.
> 
> 
> 

I think plugin development is very on topic for this side and doesn't has to be too broad or opinion based. These ones doesn't look too broad to me. [Design Pattern for implementing plugins in your application?](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/177140/design-pattern-for-implementing-plugins-in-your-application) or [How to create a pluginable Java program?](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25449/how-to-create-a-pluginable-java-program)

There are lots of software packages that enable different kinds of modifications. Sometimes you will actually modify the core product and sometimes you will only write a plugin. On example is [liferay](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/liferay "show questions tagged 'liferay'") where there seems to be no [liferay-plugins](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/liferay-plugins "show questions tagged 'liferay-plugins'") (yet). You could create a tag for everyone of those, but I'd assume that generates much more rarely used tags and some really misleading ones.

Misleading ones could be [java-plugins](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/java-plugins "show questions tagged 'java-plugins'") or [.net-plugins](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/.net-plugins "show questions tagged '.net-plugins'"). The name would suggest you are writing a plugin for [java](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/java "show questions tagged 'java'") or [.net](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/.net "show questions tagged '.net'") however you probably want to build your own product with api support. This one probably doesn't even have a known name yet and would disqualify for its own tag.

Looking at the tag even 380 people seem to find it so useful that they follow it.

I would rather keep it than creating an even larger mess.
You know what this burnination request lacks? Numbers, everyone loves numbers. So here numbers:

There are at least 10 users with score +10 in the [all time top answerers of the tag](https://stackoverflow.com/tags/plugins/topusers). The most upvoted posts of most of them seems to be one of the two:

* I want to do something with the/have a question about the plugin of X, with X being either maven, eclipse, wordpress, jquery, vim, etc.
* I'm looking for a plugin that does abc of X

Grails questions seems to be the only one tag that doesn't fit the above categories, most of them being in the form of "dependency hell" kind of issue. While the most recent ones perfectly fit above categories.

567 questions with the tag are closed, but I found many of the "looking for a plugin" that are not that needs closure.

There is [this query](https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/225883/question-stats-by-tag), but no conclusion can be drawn for it other that the average score and views is quite high:

```
TagName N     median_views avg_score closed_rate avg_answers accepted_rate answer_rate median_tta 
------- ----- ------------ --------- ----------- ----------- ------------- ----------- ---------- 
plugins 18068 262          1.6       3           1.3         46.1          82.3        100        

```

Which we have to remember that doesn't includes deleted posts.