Taginfo/Sources
Taginfo collects information about tags from several sources and brings all this data together to make it easy to browse and search. On the sources page these are listed with a timestamp showing their last update. From the downloads page data from several sources can be downloaded in an intermediate database format.
OSM Database
The main source is, of course, the OSM database itself. From the planet.osm dump many different statistics are calculated and entered into taginfo.
Wiki
The wiki contains description of keys and tags and much more. Currently taginfo will collect all the Key:xxx, Tag:xxx, and Relation:xxx pages (and their different language variants) and extract the information from them (not just those tags listed on Map Features).
Languages
Taginfo gets information about the different languages of the world, their codes, names, etc. from several IANA and Unicode registries.
Projects
Other sources such as the editors (for instance iD), routers (Open Source Routing Machine), and renderer configurations can be added using external project files. Help is always appreciated.