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Etiquette: Retagging to "tag-removed".

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    • CommentAuthorAnweshi
    • CommentTimeJan 24th 2010
     

    I noticed that Pete Clark retagged this question to tag-removed. It is a very nice way to make sure that an annoying question is ignored, without waiting for five high reputation people to join together to close, or waiting for a moderator to attend to the matter at hand.

    The question here is, might I take the same liberties? For instance, with this question, where I have done it for the sake of beta-testing? Here, the original tag probability was definitely inappropriate, and in principle, I stayed within my rights of retagging.

  2.  
    [Edited slightly in response to some confirmatory remarks of Anton G. Especially, I had said something about possibly using tag-removed whenever you decrease the number of tags, but as soon as I returned to my quest of removing inappropriate math-education tags, I realized that it was silly to have tag-removed in conjunction with other tags.]

    You should use "tag-removed" when you wish to remove one or more tags and find that you are left with no tags at all (which won't work, since every question has to have at least on tag).

    A tag or tags should be removed because it is in your best judgment clearly not applicable to the question at hand, not as a reflection on the quality of the question.

    In my case, the two tags that I removed were math-education and game-theory. The first one is a classic example of the sort of (what I consider) improper use of the m-e tag that I called attention to in a recent meta thread: this is not a pedagogical question, it's a "help me with my math question" question. Game theory is even less appropriate: my guess is that the poster was thinking of applications of projections to computer graphics in video games.

    Although it's true that I have voted to close both of these questions, I still think we should try to list at least one appropriate tag. In the case of my question, I will go back and add linear-algebra. For yours, how about combinatorics?
    • CommentAuthorAnweshi
    • CommentTimeJan 24th 2010
     

    Combinatorics it is, now.

    But the original question still stands. How about retagging to tag-removed, when a question is really annoying? Such as the one I retagged?

  4.  
    I thought I addressed this in my previous post. More succinctly: no, please don't do that.
  5.  

    What Pete said. Let's reserve using [tag-removed] for two purposes:

    1. A moderator can merge tags that shouldn't exist (like [newbie] or [math]) into it to effectively delete them.
    2. You can retag a question with [tag-removed] if there are no other appropriate tags. There's no reason for a question to ever be tagged [tag-removed] and something else. You should only retag a question [tag-removed] if the question doesn't belong on MO, so you should also be voting to close (if you can) and leaving a comment.

    If a question is really annoying and doesn't belong on MO, but there are still tags which are appropriate (to the degree that it's possible to have appropriate tags for inappropriate questions), please don't retag the question with [tag-removed]. Just vote to close, vote down, and/or flag for moderator attention.

    • CommentAuthorJonas Meyer
    • CommentTimeMar 13th 2010 edited
     
    The closed question http://mathoverflow.net/questions/18040/probability-unknown-closed was just retagged, first by one user adding [tag-removed] to [probability], and then by another user removing [probability]. I was confused by the first edit, and I disagree with the overall result. This was a case where, even though it was a bad question, [probability] seems to me like the most appropriate tag. I am inclined to retag it if no one objects.

    I've tagged a couple of questions with [tag-removed], but only in cases where I thought that the given tags were completely inappropriate. This actually happened very recently at http://mathoverflow.net/questions/18061/continuidad-funcion-real-closed where the tag was previously [functional-analysis]. Perhaps it would have been better to retag with [calculus].
  7.  
    It's certainly not a big deal to me, but I think that tag-removed is appropriate in your example. The question includes the word probability in it but in fact involves no probability theory or any other kind of mathematics. If a question asked whether it would be a good idea to remove not just 13 but all prime numbers in the labelling of floors in a hotel, would you want a number theory tag on it?

    If the question is truly "not a real question" (as seems the case in this example), then logically there ought to be no appropriate tag, right?
  8.  
    I believe the first retag was a mistake based on confusion over the meaning of "tag-removed," as I pointed out in the comment after I deleted the probability tag.

    I considered removing tag-removed, and decided to remove the probability tag because I think the question only pretends to be a probability question. It's not actually about what is studied in probability. If it actually had been about Benford's law, then a probability tag would have been appropriate. I think leaving the probability tag would have been annoying to almost anyone searching through questions tagged probability.
  9.  
    Right. Douglas and I are saying quite similar things. (And +1 for annoying to "almost all" probabilists. How appropriate.)
  10.  
    Pete and Douglas, Thank you for the feedback. I agree with most of what both of you have said, and certainly enough to agree that it is not a good idea to retag this question with probability. I like your analogy, Pete.

    Douglas, as an aside about your last point: yes it may annoy people searching through the probability tag, but the conclusion of the discussion before my post is that we shouldn't remove tags because the question is annoying. Perhaps that conclusion should be debated, or perhaps a way of ignoring closed questions should be implemented.
  11.  
    I agree that a reasonable policy is that tags should not be removed just because a question is bad or annoying. The tag does not have to contain the information the score and question status do. The tag can indicate the relevance to that part of mathematics, and I didn't think this question was really better described as a bad probability question than a bad psychology or combinatorics question. Whether that judgement was wrong can be debated, but it was the reason I used to choose which tag to delete.
    • CommentAuthorHarry Gindi
    • CommentTimeMar 14th 2010 edited
     

    I agree with Prof. Zare that it's worth removing those tags. This is especially true for the probability tag, which seems to have a lot of shoddy homework-type questions asked, at least scaled by the total number of posts in that tag. I can see why that would annoy someone who, like Prof. Zare, follows (if I've not jumped to too outlandish a conclusion) the pr.probability tag.

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