Should lots of old questions be retagged [kernel] $\to$ [kernel-trick]? [duplicate]

Question

kernel and kernel-trick are two different tags on CV, with the first one reserved for kernel smoothing and density estimating, and the second one for kernel trick in maching learning (kernel SVM, kernel PCA, etc.). I noticed that a lot of people confuse these tags, mostly by using kernel instead of more specific kernel-trick.

This is bad, because e.g. questions about kernel PCA are currently divided (approximately evenly) between these two tags. I see two possible solutions:

1. kernel-trick is removed as a separate tag and becomes a synonym of kernel.

2. The questions confusingly tagged should be re-tagged.

Personally, I think that the tags are separated quite well and would therefore prefer the second option. Moreover, I was going to go ahead and re-tag all questions about kernel PCA to kernel-trick (and possibly some other questions about SVMs, if I come across any). This would, however, bump all these questions to the front page, and if I re-tag them in one sitting, then there will be lots of questions on the same topic edited by me appearing on the front page practically one after another.

Would this be okay?

[Of course, I can also make some other improving edits and maybe even answer some of these questions along the way, to make this less of a book-keeping activity. But still.]

Update

There are currently 68 questions tagged with kernel and svm and 7 questions tagged with kernel and pca. Whereas I was originally referring only to questions on kernel PCA, the problem seems to be much more severe in the SVM topic. For comparison, there are only 16 questions tagged with kernel-trick and svm.

Update 2

Turns out, this issue was discussed two years ago: What does the kernel tag refer to? where @mbq and @whuber argued that kernel-trick is unnecessary. I think I am happy to accept this point of view, but that would mean that kernel-trick should be merged with kernel.

Update 3

I just realized that there exists kernel-density-estimate tag (used 45 times), which could most likely cover almost all uses of kernel tag that are not referring to kernel trick...

Answer 1

I would be in favor of option 2. The existence of 46 (as of 9/16/2014) tagged threads suggests that the tag has some organic utility for organizing the topics within CV.

However, I would make two suggestions:

1. Don't re-tag all the candidate threads at once, so as not to spam the main page. It is best, IMO, to do a handful at a time. As a further extension of that idea, it is best to do the re-tagging during slower traffic periods.
2. I suspect part of the problem is that kernel-trick has no tag wiki excerpt, and the excerpt for kernel is too sparse. The excerpt for kernel could be clarified a little, and something like 'DO NOT USE this tag for [kernel-trick]' could be appended to the end. Likewise, a suitable excerpt for kernel-trick should be created.