Proposal for a new Help Center section: Tagging

Question

It is glad to have a new section called Help Center nowadays, as it can only be edited by diamond (♦) moderators, we can set up credible rules or regulations in here.

But the Help Center still lack of an important section about tagging, which seems that we are still depreciate about the moderation on tagging. So now I suggest to have a new section called tagging in the Help Center.

The new tagging section should include some fundamental instructions about tagging, and most importantly, should include some concrete tagging rules, so can we can reserve the rights about sanctions on the tagging violations users.

For example:

Questions about matrices should include the matrices tag.

Questions about algebraic equations should include the polynomials tag.

Questions about transcendental equations should include the transcendental-equations tag.

Questions about diophantine equations (equations that only interested about the integer/rational solutions) should include the diophantine-equations tag.

Questions about ODEs should include the differential-equations tag.

Questions about PDEs should include the pde tag.

Questions about functional equations should include the functional-equations tag but not the functions tag.

Questions about integral equations should include the integral-equations tag.

Questions about indefinite integrals should include the indefinite-integral tag.

Questions about proper integrals should include the definite-integral tag.

Questions about improper integrals should include the improper-integrals tag.

homework and system-of-equations tag should not be used as the only tag in the questions.

Answer 1

I like certain things about this idea, but it needs development.

It could be helpful to maintain a public list of official guidelines for tagging. As you've mentioned, "the homework tag shouldn't be used on its own" is something not every new user may know about. It would also be nice to have a central place to house widely agreed-upon conventions like "ODEs go in differential-equations, PDEs go in pde."

On the other hand, I don't like the idea of concrete rules, especially not when they concern such broad categories as any question about a polynomial or matrix. Imposing these kind of restrictions could lead to situations like any question about $\operatorname{PSL}_n(\mathbb{F}_q)$ requiring both groups-of-lie-type and simple-groups, which fall under finite-groups, which of course calls for group-theory, which lives in abstract-algebra... and if you're looking at characters of $\operatorname{PSL}_n(\mathbb{F}_q)$, you're out of gas!

Of course this example is exaggeratedly dogmatic, but my point is that the discretion of the user is a necessary component in applying the most precise tags to his question. It's a lot more likely that somebody following the groups-of-lie-type tag will be interested in our $\operatorname{PSL}_n(\mathbb{F}_q)$ question than somebody idly browsing through abstract-algebra. Ideally, we'd want as many precise tags applied to a question as possible, and requiring broad "classification" tags hinders users from doing that. Improving users' ability to locate content which interests them is the point of tagging, and an effective tagging manual should enhance the precision with which it is done.

With this in mind, a better idea might be to collect lists of specialty tags in each discipline from which users can select the tags which fit for their question. Not many people know that under group-theory we've got cyclic-groups, abelian-groups, dihedral-groups, p-groups, solvable-groups, symmetric-groups, simple-groups, groups-of-lie-type, transfer-theory, group-cohomology, free-groups, frobenius-groups, lie-groups, topological-groups, algebraic-groups, profinite-groups, coxeter-groups, $\ldots$ It would be beneficial to collect this information into one page that also contains (non-mandatory) guidelines about when to use which.

To write such a thing would require an intimate knowledge of all areas of mathematics (and their MSE counterparts), though, so if this interests the community, the most appropriate platform would be a CW meta question.