Is there any way voting on the answers could be disabled? I feel it could be very influential in a bad way, distorting how people read the answers and/or being mistaken for a poll. Comments might be useful to ask for clarification, but could also be distracting... not sure about them.

@quid: I think a well-organized tree structure on tags would actually increase searchability (for humans; ample tag descriptions would hopefully take care of computer searches). Of course, I agree that enforcing consistent use of these multi-level tags could be problematic, let alone the feasibility of a complete tag overhaul... On the other hand, lots of very long, very specific tags without any organization like Yemon warns about aren't a great prospect either.

Why not use high level tags with modifiers? For instance, the second two examples could be dg.synthetic and nt.computational

I'm not sure if automatic CW-ing after a certain number of edits still exists, but if it does, I suppose these minor edits should not count, right?