You should never add the [tag-removed] tag unless there are no appropriate tags for the question. The meaning of [tag-removed] is that there was some tag that I (or another moderator) decided shouldn't exist. There are lots of questions with the [tag-removed] tag which haven't been closed. If you see one near the top of the home page, please remove the [tag-removed] tag from it.

This might sound stupid, but I honestly didn't understand what you were saying here until the third time I read this paragraph. I didn't know this; I didn't even know that there were questions with the tag [tag-removed] in addition to other tags. Can some kind of official statement be made on this subject, e.g. in the FAQ? I honestly only remember seeing this tag used on closed questions.

It now seems that the meaning I read into [tag-removed] was prompted by a second wave of usage and was not intended by the moderators.

My point wasn't that it was meant as a punishment, just that removing the tag is important, and that I don't care if an anonymous user's (with under 50 rep and one closed question) feelings are hurt by doing so. My statement about contempt was driving home the point that I don't care about such a person's feelings because that person is an annoyance and didn't take the time to read the FAQ.

I now see that I disagree with Anton and some of the others. To my mind, the point of removing tags is so that people who want to browse questions by tag (e.g. because they only feel qualified to answer questions in a particular subject) can do so without having to see irrelevant or low-level questions, and the point of [tag-removed] is as a placeholder because the system requires that every question is tagged.

At the time that I used [tag-removed], I didn't see it as an aggressive action (at least, not any more aggressive than closing the question). I may have to revise this point of view, but I still think that in the interest of making it easier for mathematicians to see and answer research-level mathematics questions, low-level questions should not have tags. I guess I agree with you after all, more or less!

In fact, you yourself are the last person to have done this: clicky. I won't fault you for it because I agree with your decision. However, the problem certainly was an optimization problem (even though it was not appropriate for MO), but you removed the tag anyway.

I mean, unless Anton and Scott have convinced you in the interim.

Returning to the issue at hand, let me see if I can summarize the current direction of the discussion. There is some disagreement about how freely the tag [tag-removed] should be used. Several users believe it could be seen as insulting and should only be used sparingly, whereas you wish to use it to actively discourage bad questions. Yes?

I think Scott, Anton, and the others made good points. We should always be ready to give users and questions the benefit of the doubt, and [tag-removed] is an unnecessarily aggressive move in many situations.

I'm not sure if you're trying to instigate or if you really think that chiming in here will actually accomplish something positive. In the first case, I'm not trying to have a fight, and in the second case, you're not helping, so if you wouldn't mind extricating yourself from this situation, I'd really appreciate it. You've managed to twist the situation here into something stupid and pointless.

But for the record, if you'd like to see the total extent of my interaction with the user VP, you can look at this thread. I think that my "contempt" for VP started somewhere after he rudely responded that what I'd said was, "ALL WRONG" in comment #17. The comment I just linked to is VP's fourth comment on meta (the first three accusing akela of being Negative Refraction), so it's a natural place to start.

This thread is not about me. I refuse to engage in any further discussion on this issue. It's about questions that have no hope of becoming legitimate and how we should tag them.

But retagging questions and especially making disparaging comments about users, whether here or on MO, isn't going to make the problem go away. It does, however, tend to discourage some good people from participation due to the surrounding drama and incivility, even if they wouldn't say so directly.

I haven't made disparaging comments about specific users (and I honestly don't have any in mind). I disagree with you about retagging questions, and I think it is a respectful disagreement. I don't think that retagging a question to "tag-removed" is uncivil, and you do. This is why we're discussing it, right?

Now, I've seen many questions that, in my opinion, clearly fall below the threshold of MO as defined by FAQ. Some of them get closed after getting downvotes, some of them generate helpful comments and even answers, occasionally even gaining upper single digit reputation. I also see very tactful efforts (sometimes, exceedingly so) to get the best out of a question. At the same time, I see partisan efforts to close perfectly reasonable questions on ideological grounds. That works like a double whammy: people wonder why instead of uniformly enforcing the clear rules about closing too elementary (routine homework type) and purposefully vague ("tell me about X") questions, the powers that be are spending their energy arguing over nebulous issues "Is this type of question good for the future of MO?"

I can at least say that I'm consistent and do vote to close questions that are too elementary or purposefully vague. The reason we have these discussions on meta isn't because we're doing it for fun. There are often different opinions on certain types of questions, and we're trying to reach a consensus about policy.

Harry, "I have contempt for people" pretty much summarizes your whole attitude. I am a real mathematician, actively participate in MO, at least for now, and you've demonstrated contempt for me as well. From what I've seen in meta and, to a lesser extent, on MO itself, your attitude is at best unhelpful and at worst, harmful.

I don't think that I've shown contempt for you, and I think that I'm in general pretty helpful to people here. Let's not make this personal, and if you feel that I have already made it personal, I apologize. Let's discuss the issue at hand here.

I think we should try to be civil --- both outwardly and inwardly.

Now, I've seen many questions that, in my opinion, clearly fall below the threshold of MO as defined by FAQ. Some of them get closed after getting downvotes, some of them generate helpful comments and even answers, occasionally even gaining upper single digit reputation. I also see very tactful efforts (sometimes, exceedingly so) to get the best out of a question. At the same time, I see partisan efforts to close perfectly reasonable questions on ideological grounds. That works like a double whammy: people wonder why instead of uniformly enforcing the clear rules about closing too elementary (routine homework type) and purposefully vague ("tell me about X") questions, the powers that be are spending their energy arguing over nebulous issues "Is this type of question good for the future of MO?"

I don't know what the best answer might be for dealing with this situation, that's something that needs to be carefully discussed and implemented on a systemic level. But retagging questions and especially making disparaging comments about users, whether here or on MO, isn't going to make the problem go away. It does, however, tend to discourage some good people from participation due to the surrounding drama and incivility, even if they wouldn't say so directly.

I have contempt for the people asking such questions, and I think they should be actively pushed away from MO. I'm inclined to believe that being harsh in these cases would not have any effect on the participation of real mathematicians, but if you disagree, I'll take your word for it.

If you want to retag something with [tag-removed], consider the tradeoffs. What do you gain by doing it? Is it worth bumping the question and annoying the owner? The most reasonable situation where it makes sense is if the question keeps being bumped, but that tag doesn't match the question. In that case, you can help the situation by leaving a comment like "I've removed the [graph-theory] tag because this question is about the graph of a function, not about graph theory." Try to make it clear that you're not retagging the question as a way to emphasize how bad it is (but don't use those words).

Retagging it [closed] only makes it more visible. The oldest question on the home page is currently 13 hours old. Of the nine questions that have been tagged [closed], none of them would be on the front page right now if they had not been retagged.

I guess retagging with the [closed] tag doesn't make things any worse for people who have [closed] on their ignored list and who have set the preference that ignored tags are hidden completely, but it's really annoying for everyone else. In particular, for "lurkers" who are just casually reading MO (we know there are a lot of them), it cultivates the impression that MO is more and more heavily populated by garbage. I also think there are good arguments for not setting the preference that questions with ignored tags are hidden completely.

If there's another mechanism to keep them from appearing on my screen at all when I look at MO, I'd be interested to know what it is.

Here's one solution, but it requires you to push a button. Create a new bookmark in your browser's bookmark toolbar. For the "location", give it

javascript:$('h3>a:contains("[closed]")').parents(".question-summary").hide();void(0);

Now whenever you're looking at a list of questions on MO, you can get all the closed questions to disappear by clicking that bookmark.

Because [tag-removed] has the same meaning as [closed]

I disagree. You should never add the [tag-removed] tag unless there are no appropriate tags for the question. The meaning of [tag-removed] is that there was some tag that I (or another moderator) decided shouldn't exist. There are lots of questions with the [tag-removed] tag which haven't been closed. If you see one near the top of the home page, please remove the [tag-removed] tag from it.

When I cast the final vote to close on a question that is complete garbage, I remove the tags and replace them with [tag-removed]. If it seems like it can be reopened with a bit of work, I leave the tag.

I think that this is a good solution.

Are there any remaining objections to merging [closed] into [tag-removed]?

Excellent idea!

Are there any remaining objections to merging [closed] into [tag-removed]?

If I recall correctly, currently the SE software does not give moderators/admins the ability to rephrase the reasons for closure, unfortunately.

That's correct. If this ever changes, I will certainly make use of it.

Is there any reference in the public dumps as to why the question was closed?

No, but there isn't any good reason for that. It's just because it would require me to write a slightly more clever script for producing the public dumps. I'll try to include the reason for closing in the next dump.

@Anton: we crossed messages. Thanks for the data. I should be able to manipulate the xml files easily enough, to enable my own playing around.

Turns out you're absolutely right. For some reason, I thought the public dumps didn't include information on whether/when a question was closed, but they do. You can get a list of all the closed questions with the command

grep 'ClosedDate=' posts.xml

There are 662 closed questions. Here is how many of them have a given score:

Score, number
-15, 1
-11, 1
-9, 1
-8, 2
-7, 8
-6, 15
-5, 28
-4, 39
-3, 65
-2, 89
-1, 124
0, 162
1, 59
2, 18
3, 14
4, 6
5, 6
6, 3
7, 3
9, 1
10, 1
11, 3
12, 2
14, 1
15, 1
17, 1
21, 1
22, 1
23, 1
24, 1
26, 2
27, 1
35, 1

Let me know if there's some other statistics you want which are hard to get out of the public dump. If I can easily produce them, I will.

Yes, we should remove all tags on closed questions. This should be automatic upon closure.

I disagree. I just don't see what good that would do. As Scott said, it is often expected that the question will be revised. Even if you expect a question to be closed permanently, why would we want to remove tags which are appropriate to the question? As François suggested, the whole point of keeping a question around if it is closed as a duplicate is to make it easier for people to find the original. Moreover, removing all the tags from a question would make people take closure even more personally than they already do, which would be awful.

10k+ rep users can vote to delete closed questions, so even if we do get a tsunami of terrible closed questions, we don't have to worry too much about them getting in the way.

If a question is closed because it's totally off-topic or is somehow a clear-cut "bad" question, then it should just slip off into oblivion. Retagging it [closed] only makes it more visible. The oldest question on the home page is currently 13 hours old. Of the nine questions that have been tagged [closed], none of them would be on the front page right now if they had not been retagged. I realize that this argument doesn't apply quite as well if you use the questions page rather than the home page, but I think it still holds water.

If a question is closed, but is somewhat controversial, or is subsequently revised, then it should be highly visible so that people can vote to reopen it if appropriate.

I propose removing the [closed] tag from the ecosystem (via a moderator merging it into [tag-removed], as usual), but I'll hold off on doing that for a while in case somebody has an objection.