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Yes - I understand what Wifi is.

My question is, why do we have a tag for it? As a gaming website, supporting networking technologies is outside of our scope, and the closest we're ever really going to get to is .

Can we just merge these two tags together or is there a particular reason why we've got a Wifi tag?

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    Wifi comes built-in on a lot of gaming devices nowadays, and is a fairly common feature for users to have a problem configuring. Since part of our mission is game-specific hardware and utilities, I can see how it might be useful.
    – Sconibulus
    May 2, 2013 at 20:06
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    our faq disagrees with you, in fact, it seems to imply "questions directly related to gaming", configuring wifi from the point of view of gaming is perfectly covered under a single networking tag as any "game specific" settings for wifi would in fact be related to networking, rather than the configuration of your wifi adaptor
    – user27134
    May 2, 2013 at 20:09
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    13 questions. Doesn't seem worth keeping separately -- it doesn't function much on its own, and combining it with a game/platform tag of interest means you're barely going to see any questions (if any).
    – Matthew Read
    May 2, 2013 at 20:52
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    @Sconibulus +1. "Networking" questions probably deal with NAT issues, connection issues, lag and the such. "Wifi" is likely an unrelated can of worms on top of it all.
    – badp
    May 2, 2013 at 22:19
  • I don't see why we need the tag at all. Wifi is not a gaming-specific area of expertise. If we have problems configuring [x] device's wifi, then it should be tagged [x] anyway
    – Robotnik Mod
    Oct 22, 2013 at 9:45

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The tags are almost completely separate. Merging them sounds inappropriate.

Setting up and troubleshooting a wifi link is a OSI level 1-2 issue ("I'm losing packets from my neighbour's wifi because there's a wall in between!").

Our use of the networking tag seems to be overwhelmingly about levels 3-5 ("I can't discover my friend's server! How can I do port forwarding?").

In English, you can have issues regardless of whether or not you're using and issues normally translate in issues that go beyond any one program or video game and are thus trivially easy to identify as such. They're separate layers that are only loosely coupled. The issue, in short, is much simpler than the justification I've just given. We have been consistently using those tags.

There was only one question tagged and ; while the asker seems convinced that the only change he made was in level 2 (wifi password), this affected higher levels too so... I think the use of both tags is justified in the end, and also a further argument against merging.

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  • I know some of the posters here only have a middling level of technical knowledge, so as someone who is a professional let me just say that this is completely and unequivocally right in my opinion. (You could argue that the distinction would be lost on the question askers who are actually using the tags, mind you, but I don't know if I agree with that.)
    – Shinrai
    May 3, 2013 at 20:33
  • @Shinrai I think that the tags have been applied consistently so far.
    – badp
    May 3, 2013 at 23:13
  • Right, they seem pretty well applied so far.
    – Shinrai
    May 4, 2013 at 1:39

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