4 years later on the servo vs hobby servo tags

Question

4 years after the last discussion I can find on this topic it looks like after around 2014 the hobbyservo tag fell out of use and the servo tag has become a catch all, as it seems that the majority of questions have not been about industrial servos, I propose that we simple make hobby servo a synonym of servo, and in questions asking about industrial servos posters call that out explicity.

We might also change to using an industrialservo tag for those requiring it because the large majority of beginners posting have no idea that what hey are using should be called a "hobby servo" as opposed to just a servo.

Answer 1

From the servos info page: https://robotics.stackexchange.com/tags/servos/info

Most servos questions should fall into the subcategories of either industrial servomotor or rcservo (with the synonym hobbyservo). Only questions which do not fall into these two sub-categories should use this tag.

To summarise this taxonomy of tags:

• 57 servos questions, last in January 2017
• 42 rcservo questions, last in October 2016
• 59 servomotor questions, 5 asked so far this month

Part of the point of the servos tag is to help identify questions which haven't been correctly tagged as either either rcservo or servomotor.

The idea was that if you see a question tagged with servos, anyone could suggest an edit to the question to re-tag it with rcservo or servomotor as required. If it wasn't clear from the question whether it was referring to an rcservo or a servomotor, then this could be clarified and then properly tagged.

There was a time when I would go through servos tagged questions myself doing this, but then the community started doing it, and I just had to approve the suggested edits.

Although it looks like a clean up may be required, I think the basic principle still stands and our current taxonomy is the correct solution top the problem of servos questions being consistently being mis-tagged.

2020 Update

After making hobbyservo and digitalservo into synonyms of rcservo and making servos into a synonym of otherservo the problem seems to have reduced substantially:

• 70 rcservo questions, up to Nov 29 '19
• 102 servomotor questions, up to Dec 28 '19
• 33 otherservos questions, up to Jun 9 '16

There are still questions in otherservos which would be better off tagged with either rcservo, servomotor or both, and there are still questions tagged as one which should be more accurately tagged as the other, so feel free to edit these tags (or suggest an edit) when you find them.