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: 
There's a few problems here

1. 18k+ questions. A while back, [we burninated the godaddy tag](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/331817/should-we-burninate-godaddy). That was ~2000 questions (the largest successful burnination to date AFAIK), and we wound up locking the tag at the end, instead of retagging about 200 questions. It took well over a month of concerted effort, and the scope really took its toll, since there was inevitable controversy over some of the closed/deleted questions. This would be the largest burnination ever, and my bet is **it would take about a year to complete** (and I'm being optimistic there).
2. Some of the other plugin tags mentioned in comments are synonyms of base tags (like [wordpress-plugin](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/wordpress-plugin "show questions tagged 'wordpress-plugin'") is a synonym of [wordpress](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/wordpress "show questions tagged 'wordpress'")). It actually doesn't make sense to go backwards in those places.
3. While [plugins](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/plugins "show questions tagged 'plugins'") can't really stand on its own, it does qualify tags. The problem is trying to go purely with a hyphen tag solution (i.e. [jquery-plugins](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/jquery-plugins "show questions tagged 'jquery-plugins'")) is you would have a **massive** bloat of tags. Plugins exist everywhere, and writing or working with them is an on-topic reason to use SO. Trying to make one for every tag under the sun doesn't make sense. I'd actually argue some of the hyphen tags should go away and make them use this generic.

The case for blacklisting here is weak at best. But I just don't see the need for a full blown burnination here.
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.