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Some questions are tagged with . I am a bit confused about its purpose. It is needed to clearly state the role of this tag. That is the first problem.

Recently, the question on Montclair university received this tag, removing all the other tags.

The question might have deserved tags like , or , in my opinion. Even for closed and inappropriate questions, it will be useful for taxonomic purposes to keep the descriptive tags intact. In any case, it is clear that the role of needs to be clearly spelled out.

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  • $\begingroup$ Given the protocol in use so far, it apparently means "the original tag is defunct but can be found by searching for this question in the Tag Changes Archive thread on meta". $\endgroup$
    – T..
    Commented Dec 17, 2010 at 8:53

2 Answers 2

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As argued before, if that question is so bad that you don't want it to clog up the system, it should be deleted, not creating a new tag . I don't see any point using this tag for its 2nd purpose.

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Yes, sorry, I was going to do this on the initial thread and forgot. [tag-removed] means two things: the first meaning is its original meaning on MO, and the second meaning is an unintended meaning it came to have in the MO community. The second meaning is up for debate.

  • This question had a tag which was inappropriate, and that tag was merged so as not to bump the question. (That is, it's a hack.)
  • This question was closed, so it should no longer clog up the tagging system.
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  • $\begingroup$ "to bump the question" -- do you mean that inappropriate tags bump the question? $\endgroup$
    – user1119
    Commented Dec 17, 2010 at 9:24
  • $\begingroup$ @George: no, I mean that removing a tag manually bumps the question, but merging doesn't. $\endgroup$
    – Qiaochu Yuan Mod
    Commented Dec 17, 2010 at 9:35
  • $\begingroup$ @Qiaochu: Thanks, now I understand. So, your use of [tag-removed] this time seems to be of the second type. Now, as you say, it is surely up for debate. :) $\endgroup$
    – user1119
    Commented Dec 17, 2010 at 9:47
  • $\begingroup$ @George S.: no, this time it was to create the [tag-removed] tag. You are free to restore this tag if you want since it now has independent life. $\endgroup$
    – Qiaochu Yuan Mod
    Commented Dec 17, 2010 at 10:20
  • $\begingroup$ @Qiaochu: That tag already existed, as you can see from math.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tag-removed ... And, no, it's ok, one question is ok; I just wanted to query you about the general policy. $\endgroup$
    – user1119
    Commented Dec 17, 2010 at 11:26
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    $\begingroup$ @Qiaochu: I am firmly convinced of Anton's recent explanation on MO, and also Kenny's explanation above. We should not abuse [tag-removed] for what it was not intended to do. Bad question should just be closed (or deleted if offensive). $\endgroup$
    – Willie Wong Mod
    Commented Dec 17, 2010 at 12:05
  • $\begingroup$ Also, what is done is done, so I'll leave the tag alone because I don't want to bump it back up the front page again. $\endgroup$
    – Willie Wong Mod
    Commented Dec 17, 2010 at 12:07
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    $\begingroup$ if you're worried about the front page remember that /questions will give you a list of chronological questions, and also that you can do these operations in small bite-size chunks rather than big-bang $\endgroup$
    – Jeff Atwood Mod
    Commented Dec 17, 2010 at 14:00

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