Earlier in 2013, for a short time a volcano of postings about basic homework questions took over practically the entire meta.MSE, with the same 20 users rapidly exchanging what seemed to be thousands of comments, questions and answers.
One side effect of that was the creation of neologisms improvised to refer to different flavors of homework-like postings: PSQ, CPQ, CPHQ. More recently there have been derivatives of this terminology, such as SOP, floating in comment discussions.
If you do not know what any of those abbreviations mean, that may be enough reason to upvote this question. The rest of this post is for people who do recognize those terms and, possibly, still use them.
The proposal is to:
- discourage the use of acronyms like "PSQ" as though everyone knows what they mean
- if you do use them, clearly define the abbreviation at the first place in a question or answer or comment thread where it is used
- do not use PSQ, CPHQ, etc in the hope they can serve as search words for postings. There is not enough consistency in use for the search results to be complete or unbiased. Instead, add one tag (such as [problem-only-questions], but it can be anything, including the existing homework tag) to questions that are about that subject, and link it as a tag like problem-only-questions in answers that you want to be searchable.
- Retag the small number of old questions, if any exist, that do not bear the homework tag and are based on any of the PSQ-like acronyms, with whatever the PSQ-replacement tag will be.
Reasons
new meta users cannot be expected to find the whole forest of old discussions to understand the definition and conversations that developed around it. There are active meta users who registered later than the discussions that created the acronyms, and there is an unknown number of silent meta readers who might see the terms and ignore a discussion that they could have understood if the phrases were written in longer English.
confused users continue to post questions and comments asking what the terms mean
it is good to minimize private in-group terminology in a forum open to all users
discussion volume has slowed on the topic, reducing the need for short abbreviations.
there is no consistency among users in what phrases and abbreviations are used, which MSE postings they are primarily talking about when they do use the term, and whether they really mean only those postings or some other set for which the PSQ, CPQ etc are a definable substitute (e.g., wanting to ban all homework postings, or to allow all "interesting" problems no matter how they are presented).
As stated above, it biases search results to look for, say, "PSQ", since many people who post on these matters on meta do not use exactly that term.
The same arguments apply to all highly localized terms developed within MSE, but I do not know of any others in use at the moment except the PSQ family.