Q:

Let's nuke [publish] and [publishing]

The situation
The publish (1,436 questions) and publishing (770 questions) tags are used across a very wide range of topics, including questions about

publishing Android apps on Google Play,
publishing iOS apps on the App Store,
publishing research on RPubs,
publishing .NET applications on IIS,
registering DLLs in .NET applications,
the publish() function in Meteor,
putting SQL source into TFS version control,
automatically moving built files to a public server with Jenkins,
BizTalk web services,
troubleshooting HTTP errors in ASP.NET, and
publishing JARs to a local Maven repository.

That's just from the current front pages of both tags.
The proposal
I believe that these tags are largely useless and should be considered for removal.
If removal is not possible, let's at least consider merging them. The choice between which to use appears to be arbitrary, and there is considerable similarity between the two tag wikis:

From the publish wiki:

To publish is the process to make something publicly available. This might be the stuff that happens inside a CRM system after editing an article and finally publishing it, or publishing a project artifact.

From the publishing wiki:

releasing software to users. This may include releasing compiled binaries on a hardware medium, for download, or permitting access to a non-development web service.

Prefixed tags
Some folks have suggested adding prefixed versions of these tags for a few use cases. I'm entirely on board with that. Here is a short list of suggested prefixed tags:

meteor-publish, for questions relating to Meteor's publish() function
oneclick-publish, for questions relating to Microsoft's One-Click Publish feature

A:

I do not think these tags should be burninated. While it is true publish(ing) software is not always done from a code standpoint, it can be and several popular frameworks do allow for it, or for its setup in xml or code.
The few question shown in your post merely show the wide variance of the tag, but I am not sold that that requires it to be entirely removed as it does add context. There is a one click publish in asp.net mvc that requires setup in xml for example.
One of the comments shows that there is a meteor api function publish. Any time there is an actual api related to a vague word it is best to prefix it (as suggested) and make it relate to the api. 
This just goes to show that these tags need to be cleaned, or reviewed. But I do not think burnination makes as much sense here, and I certainly didn't see 90% misuse of the tag.

A:

It seems like we should:

Replace these tags with meaningful tags:

meteor-publish for meteor's publish
[add tags here as you find/make them]

Either patrol the unprefixed tag(s) forever (in which case the wiki should link here) or salt them (which would ideally also link here)

