Categories should be used for broad categories of posts. For example, see how Writing separates the main Q&A from writing challenges, or how Cooking separates its Q&A from recipes, or how Meta separates Q&A from blog. A reasonable question to ask to indicate whether a separate category might be useful is: will this content be handled substantially differently by the community? Having too many categories can be problematic; Photography & Video has five, and even that seems rather a lot.

What you list seem to be topic areas or areas of expertise, which is what tags would be for.

Also, tags are created when they are first used; there is no separate process to create tags beforehand. If you have questions that would benefit from these tags, then just post them and use those as tags.

However, I personally fail to see the utility of, say, a "distribution-specific" tag. Who is going to search for all distribution-specific questions, or be able to say "I'm an expert in distribution-specific things". Tags for specific distributions, such as for example "debian", "freebsd", "aix", or "kali", would seem to be more useful. I've found such a litmus test for tags to be useful in general; just because someone can say about a tag "I'm an expert in XYZ" doesn't necessarily make it a good tag (it can, for example, still be too broad, or redundant), but if a person can't even say that, there's good reason to think that it'll make a bad tag.

posted over 3 years ago

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3y ago

Canina‭

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