Is it all that useful to allow arbitrary new users to create tags?

Question

As a voluntary spam fighter, I flag a lot of spam across the Stack Exchange network every day. Spam posts on other sites carry random irrelevant tags, such as javascript+c#+php+android on Stack Overflow.

When coming across this post, I was surprised to see that Wow, there even exist tags for those pharma spams! Later I just found that this Ask Patents allows tag creation with only 1 reputation, i.e., an arbitrary user (unless they're suspended).

That, however, makes really little sense on these posts. Is this site tolerant of tags like supplements, weight-loss or similar? Is it useful that anyone can create new tags?

Answer 1

The rationale for keeping the new tag privilege at 1 reputation is to allow new users to tag their question with the patent number. This was discussed several times throughout the life of this site:

• What is the rationale for having the patent number as a tag?
• Can patents be searchable by number?
• Autotagging with patent number

It's a feature, so it can be abused, so it is abused. But out of all the problems this site has, the occasional appearance of weird tags (which get automatically removed in 24 hours or so after the post is gone) is relatively unimportant.