I've been very slow about it, but in relation to this question: Issue with [students-t] tag, I have finally re-tagged them all (bar the last couple which I will take care of after a suitable interval from my last few retags, perhaps later today) to either [t-test] or [t-distribution].
What's the best action to take with the empty tag? The linked question suggests making it a synonym of [t-test] (and I don't object to that if that's seen as a good option by people other than myself) but I wonder if that's really the best option.
For example, a lot of the uses of it since that post were [t-distribution] (perhaps near to half) and I think that mislabeling a [t-test] question with [t-distribution] is slightly less bad than the other way around.
Another alternative would be to ban the tag (on meta and meta.SO they talk about burninating* blacklisting tags). I think this is less easy to achieve but may be worth considering pursuing.
So what to do?
If you have an opinion please consider putting it as an answer, to enable voting.
*sorry, I used the wrong word there. I meant making it so nobody can recreate it or we'll be killing it again in a few months.
Specifically see burninate-request:
It stands for simple deletion of a tag. Burninating tags does not imply that they will be merged with another tag, synonymized with another tag, or blacklisted altogether.
and blacklist-request:
This tag is used in requests for adding one or more tags to the blacklist, preventing them from ever being recreated.
Blacklisting a tag removes all occurrences of it from the target site and prevents anyone from ever using that tag again.
Tags must be "quite bad" to be blacklisted. Generally, these are tags that could never convey any useful information or are actively harmful to the site. Because of the potential consequences of getting something wrong, only the dev team is able to add tags to a site's blacklist.
So if there's a consensus that the tag is horrible and needs to be made not-recreatable, we can request that (even then it may not happen, it depends on how bad the tag is understood to be).