The Zombie Stack Exchanges That Just Won't Die
I can think of useful tags that seem pretty normal TO ME:
etc. And I suspect it's a Good Thing that we'll have a de facto folksonomy as well. (Ask Sandy Berman about rigidly controlled subject vocabularies sometime, especially if you don't know why you're asking him.)
So what suggestions would you like to offer for standard question-subject tags?
Ben Ostrowsky
I don't argue to use an existing classification instead of user-provide tags, but it should be worth to have a look at existing indexing schemes in library and information science:
The fact that most of these schemes are not publically available tells us something about the role of library and information science in the digital age. :-(
So the best scheme is probably Wikipedia/DBPedia. A tag is choosen well, if there is a Wikipedia article about its subject. In addition we could include terms from ODLIS.
I'm not sure if you're suggesting restricting the list of available tags or just coming up with a list of possible tags to use in questions, so I'll try to hit both points.
Ignoring for the moment that there is no way to pre-create tags or to enforce that only existing tags are used, you might find it best to let tags grow naturally.
It'd be difficult to predict which questions will be asked or how they're best discovered through tagging. Over time, you should end up with a decent set of tags that accurately reflects the topics of the various questions you have.
Now, of course, there's room for interpretation here and sometimes there will be two or more tags referring to the same thing. Then you can pick the canonical version (by asking here on meta, if needed) and set up tag synonyms.
Last but not least, as you (as a community) work on your tags, keep an eye out for meta tags and do your best to avoid them.