# Tag cleanup 2014 [duplicate]

Tags need a regular cleanup. There was a number of questions on particular tags recently — but (while proposals for some really major changes should, perhaps, be posted as separate questions) maybe a separate question for each case is too much.

In the past we used Tag merging and synonyms thread — but it grew too cluttered to be of much use.

Rules of the game are basically the same:

• a particularly bad tag (rule of thumb from the previous thread: «roughly speaking ... if I can't imagine a person classifying a tag as either interesting or ignored, I'm getting rid of it»),
• a tag that should be a synonym of an existing one,
• a tag that used for two or more completely unrelated things;
• upvote/downvote/comment as your agree/disagree with suggestions;
• wait a day or two before implementing suggestion;
• when retagging questions by hand please keep your rate down to a few posts a day, so not to flood the main page.
• (If you think the Tag Merging and Synonyms thread is cluttered, just wait until you get that extra 900 rep and see all the deleted answers!) – Willie Wong Jan 16 '14 at 16:31
• As you write, Tag merging and synonyms thread is quite long. That's why it is useful viewing the answers there sorted by recent activity. – Martin Sleziak Jan 16 '14 at 19:52
• @Martin I use sort by recent activity on all question (both here and on main). It doesn't solve all problems (for one thing, there comments are folded immediately — even for answers with only one comment). – Grigory M Jan 16 '14 at 20:09
• @Martin: I agree with Grigory, with almost 150 answers (included deleted), that thread is just exhausted out. Regardless to how you sort the answers. – Asaf Karagila Jan 16 '14 at 21:50
• @AsafKaragila The two most recent posts there (1 and 2) received som votes and comments and they were resolved. This at least shows that there are some people who read that thread. (Although it seems that we have digressed from the questions posted by Grigory. If needed, we can continue the discussion about the long thread in chat.) – Martin Sleziak Jan 17 '14 at 8:49
• @Martin: And I still follow that thread. But it's generally difficult to do so. – Asaf Karagila Jan 17 '14 at 8:51

Resolved: Both and have been merged into (and made synonyms) of .

I propose merging and into something like, say, .

• (Or maybe just making one synonym of another...) – Grigory M Jul 9 '14 at 6:53
• Can you create a homology-cohomology tag (by adding it to a question), and then create tag excerpt and and at least a stub of a tag-wiki? After that I can go ahead and merge both homology and cohomology into the new tag, and make them both synonyms. – user642796 Sep 23 '14 at 4:56
• @ArthurFischer I took the liberty of doing it myself. It seems to me that homological-algebra is more adequate for (co)chain complexes in general, hence the tag wiki I wrote. – Najib Idrissi Dec 5 '14 at 9:11
• @NajibIdrissi: Thanks. This seems to have been one of the most popular suggestions here, but I've felt a bit out of my mathematical comfort in keeping things clean while going through with it. – user642796 Dec 5 '14 at 9:54
• @Najib, Arthur thank you! – Grigory M Jan 1 '15 at 17:22
• (I haven't been actively using SE for several months and missed this.) – Grigory M Jan 1 '15 at 17:24

Resolved (for now): I (Arthur Fischer) made an "executive decision" and went with my own preferred . If there are strong feelings that this is not optimal, feel free to add something to the Tag Management 2015 thread.

The tag is misspelled.

• I think the best renaming of it would be moment-generating-fn, perhaps. – user61527 May 16 '14 at 0:51
• moment-generating-functn would also fit within the character limit, as would moment-generating-functns. – user642796 Sep 5 '14 at 10:24
• moment-generatingfunction (with apologies to Wilf)? – Eric Stucky Nov 7 '14 at 22:49
• moment-generatin-function has a certain hayseed charm. – Alexander Gruber Jan 1 '15 at 20:44

Resolved: It is now a synonym of field-theory.

Do we really need ?

(This tag is still at large, can we do something about it?)

Resolved

I can't see much good coming out of . Most questions will probably be sylow theory questions concluding that a group is nilpotent. I propose we merge it into .

• It seems as though the nilpotent-groups tag is now empty. I'm not sure if anything else should be done here. – user642796 Apr 9 '14 at 7:16
• nilpotent-groups is gone, but nilpotence is around. Do you have any thoughts about this? – user642796 Sep 3 '14 at 8:52
• @ArthurFischer Yikes, I don't like that at all. Nilpotent matrices and nilpotent groups are hardly related, so this mixes apples and oranges, in addition to being crappy in the way the old tag was. I vote to kill it. – Alexander Gruber Sep 3 '14 at 13:50

Resolved

A new tag was created. It should probably be synonym of .

AFAIK precalculus is American term. That's why I asked in chat for some feedback from people familiar with American education system. The feedback was that they should be synonyms. (If the new tag is needed at all.) But of course, if there are any reasons why this would not be a correct action, we can discuss it in comment to this post.

EDIT: I have just noticed that this synonym has already been suggested. Users with score at leat 5 on the can vote for (or against) this synonym.

• (And precalculus is a relatively meaningless, very general term at that) – davidlowryduda Jun 10 '14 at 6:11
• Preschool precalculus is going to be the next big thing. – Asaf Karagila Jun 10 '14 at 7:04

Resolved

Should be deleted? Just 4 questions tagged...

• With only 4 questions in the tag (and 5 votes in support for its removal), I think the better way to go is to remove it from the questions (fixing other things if applicable). Then the tag gets axed automatically. – user147263 Sep 3 '14 at 14:38
• I've retagged 3 questions left by hand – Grigory M Jan 1 '15 at 18:53

Resolved

Do we really need ?

I'm really asking here, although I can clearly point out that my default view is against new tags, unless evidence shows otherwise (and there is no evidence in this case to begin with).

• I agree, the tag seems to be unnecessary. – Grigory M Jul 14 '14 at 9:11
• we have one there as floor- function – mrs Sep 10 '14 at 8:04

Resolved: both and are now synonyms of .

is a tag, but is not. Unfair!

I think these might be useful since is huge and does not quite fit to distinguish these (it fits in principle, but these are analysis questions). There are 61 questions there.

Maybe rename to ?

• Seems in the spirit of limsup-and-liminf – Asaf Karagila Aug 4 '14 at 3:10
• The name in the previous comment is now the master synonym for both sup and inf. – Willie Wong Sep 1 '14 at 7:35
• Thursday, is this "going up" from the sup of one set to the inf of another, or "going down" from the sup of a set, to its inf? – Asaf Karagila Sep 3 '14 at 13:38
• It appears that the infimum tag wiki and excerpt were imported into the new tag. I've made fairly trivial edits to both to indicate that both concepts fall under this umbrella tag. An interested party is of course free to improve it further. – user642796 Sep 3 '14 at 18:16
• @Arthur: In Soviet Russia, the party is interested in you! – Asaf Karagila Sep 7 '14 at 21:50

Resolved: Synonym approved, and tags merged.

On meta, there are (71 posts) and (13 posts), with identical tag wiki. I think they should be synonymized.

Update: seeing 6 upvotes here, I went ahead and suggested the synonym. Please vote. (There are now two synonyms there to vote for)

• Speaking about synonyms of closing, I think it is worth having (close-reasons) as a separated tag. (However, I did not know whether making a separate post in this thread saying these two tags should not be synonyms would be an appropriate use of this thread.) – Martin Sleziak Sep 5 '14 at 10:54

Resolved: has been made a synonym of .

We have two tags and . I think they should be synonyms. (I do not have sufficient reputation in either of the two for suggesting a synonym.)

The tag-wiki of the first one specifically says that it is for questions about quadratic equations. The second one has empty tag-wiki, but the name of the tag is self-explanatory. So does the second one.

Tag-excerpt history for quadratics, tag-excerpt history for quadratic-equations, tag-wiki history for quadratic-equations. (I have added these links to preserve the tag-excerpts/tag-wikis; since it is difficult to find them once the tag has been removed.)

• Only now I have noticed that synonymizing these two was also suggested in the old thread. – Martin Sleziak Mar 27 '14 at 18:06
• Synonym has been suggested. Four upvotes will make it effective. – Pedro Tamaroff Jan 3 '15 at 13:21
• Here is link to the synonym voting page. – Martin Sleziak Jan 3 '15 at 14:04
• @PedroTamaroff: FYI, when a moderator suggests a synonym, that synonym is made. – user642796 Jan 7 '15 at 4:58

Resolved: was merged into (but not made a synonym of) .

Although I don't find necessary a tag like "integral-dependance" I suggest to (remove or) rename it "integral-dependence" which is a more common terminology.

• We definately need to fix this! – user147263 Sep 2 '14 at 21:19
• Discussions about the effectiveness of the properly named tag should probably go elsewhere. (I'm not really one to judge.) – user642796 Sep 3 '14 at 6:23
• @ArthurFischer Thanks. I've tried to start a topic on this matter here buy it was closed and I was sent here. – user26857 Sep 3 '14 at 6:49
• @user26857: That question appears to be just about correcting the name of the tag (and why I cast a binding vote to close it as a duplicate of this question). It was only in this answer that I saw any indication that even a properly named tag might not be worthwhile. There's a number of answers here about the whether tags should be kept at all, and if you can make a case that it should be removed, please add a new answer explaining why. – user642796 Sep 3 '14 at 6:56
• @ArthurFischer Actually my intention was exactly what you done (thank you again), namely renaming the old tag. If it is really useful or not, I don't know, because I'm no so involved with the tagging policy of this site. – user26857 Sep 3 '14 at 12:50

Resolved: Both and have been merged into (and made synonyms of) .

Currently on meta we have both a tag and a tag. While the operations of tag-synonymising and tag-merging are not the same, they are frequently done in concert and the difference between them may not be fully appreciated by the average user (or even the average meta-user). (The latter meta-tag is also quite new.)

I suggest that both of these meta-tags be merged into and made synonyms of a new 1 meta-tag.

1Thanks to mau for making this tag-name suggestion. Not quite as fun, but likely easier to, errrr, manage.

• Maybe [tag-headache] instead? :-) – Asaf Karagila Jan 25 '14 at 18:24
• @Asaf: Now that you (almost) mention it, a headache meta-tag might be useful. Except I'd be tempted to make every meta-tag a synonym of it! – user642796 Jan 26 '14 at 13:55
• (tag-management)? – mau Jan 28 '14 at 13:06
• @mau: At first glance I really like your suggestion. I'm going to mull it over a little bit further before I edit the post. Thanks! – user642796 Jan 28 '14 at 13:19

Resolved: the tag was cleaned up. To keep it clean, was created as a synonym of .

Antonio Vargas pointed out that is misused. I think this is because it's the only tag that comes up when one types "maclaurin" in the tag field.

Proposal: create as a synonym of the existing .

• +1 This would be a great improvement. – Gamma Function Mar 29 '14 at 6:08
• Okay, so I've created the requested synonym. I also think that all questions currently tagged euler-maclaurin are correctly tagged. So this might be a done deal. – user642796 Apr 9 '14 at 7:28
• @ArthurFischer, should tag synonyms come up as suggestions when typing a tag? When I try to tag something "maclaurin-expansion", the tag that's suggested is "euler-maclaurin". – Antonio Vargas Oct 16 '14 at 14:01

Resolved: was pluralised to become and this was merged into and made a synonym of .

should become

• Should I take this to mean merging co-algebra into a brand-new coalgebras and making them synonyms? – user642796 Apr 9 '14 at 7:31
• @Arthur Yes, I think so – Grigory M Apr 18 '14 at 14:06

Are and important enough to have separate tags?

If not, maybe the best thing to do would be not to remove the tags, but to create synonyms to . (So if someone in the future wants to create the tags again, he will simply get the question tagged by (ideals).)

At the moment, there are only two questions having these tags:

Resolved

I suggest should be a synonym for .

Resolved

I think that and might be over specific here, and perhaps should be merged into .

• there are no questions with these tags now – Grigory M Jan 1 '15 at 18:58

What does stand for?

Five questions, no wiki.

Resolved: The tag was removed.

The tag-excerpt for (which was created by Tunk-Fey) reads:

Question about logic puzzles and riddles that requires thinking in unconventional ways with given constraints in mind.

The tag-excerpt for , which was created by Asaf Karagila:

This tag is meant for questions about the mathematical principles behind games, riddles, or their possible solutions. If the answer is known to you please do not use this tag to "riddle" other users, but rather to ask about the correctness of a possible solution or ways to extend and improve an existing solution.

When I read the tag-excerpts, I don't see any substantial difference, so I think the two tags should be synonyms. (However, I do not have enough reputation in the (puzzle) tag to suggest a synonym.)

• The new tag can be removed altogether, I think. – Asaf Karagila Sep 7 '14 at 18:42
• One of two questions with a tag needed an edit anyway, so I retagged along the way. Based on votes here, I think there is enough support to remove the tag from the other question as well. (cc: @Asaf) – user147263 Sep 7 '14 at 19:08
• @Thursday: Is this a suggestion that I remove the tag? – Asaf Karagila Sep 8 '14 at 0:28
• @AsafKaragila It might be. – user147263 Sep 8 '14 at 0:29
• @Thursday: Stop talking in riddles, Monday! – Asaf Karagila Sep 8 '14 at 0:30
• @Tunk-Fey: Oh, so it's just recreational-mathematics? Yeah, brainteaser can go away. – Asaf Karagila Sep 8 '14 at 7:04
• @AsafKaragila: According to Cambridge dictionary, puzzle as a noun means: 1. a situation which is difficult to understand 2. a game or toy in which you have to fit separate pieces together, or a problem or question which you have to answer by using your skill or knowledge. brainteaser : a problem for which it is hard to find the answer, especially one which people enjoy trying to solve as a game. So, using the given definition, which tag should be suitably removed? – Tunk-Fey Sep 8 '14 at 7:04
• @Tunk-Fey: You could have used the edit button. Now it looks like I can go back in time, and I will not hear the end of it. It's enough that I am expected to read minds! – Asaf Karagila Sep 8 '14 at 7:07

Resolved: The tag has been emptied.

only consists of one question, but I don't think it's supposed to be . Anybody understand what the question is asking well enough to determine what it should be classified under?

• I thought tags used only on one question are deleted automatically? – Grigory M Jan 21 '14 at 8:35
• @GrigoryM: According to Willie Wong's answer you're correct. That is, if after 6 months a tag has only been used on a single question, that tag will be removed (see Jeff Atwood's MSO answer). – user642796 Jan 21 '14 at 10:02
• @GrigoryM Sure but I'm trying to figure out what I should retag it with. – Alexander Gruber Jan 21 '14 at 21:12
• @Alexander (I'm afraid I can't comprehend that question, but) perhaps asking OP in the comments there might help?.. – Grigory M Jan 21 '14 at 21:19
• The tag has been removed. – Martin Sleziak Mar 19 '14 at 17:21

Resolved: has been merged into (and made a synonym of) .

Can be merged into (and made a synonym of) ?

What's ?

Is it for questions about research, or questions which are research? Or does it even matter? [read: maybe we should delete the tag altogether]

• Just by the name of tag I'd expect something similar to (advice) or (career-development). But when I look what kind of questions is in that tag, I see only a few questions like this. – Martin Sleziak Jun 12 '14 at 6:50
• If we are discussing this tag, we might as well look into (undergraduate-research). – Martin Sleziak Jun 12 '14 at 6:52
• I looked at the questions there ... just delete this thing, along with its little sibling undergraduate-research. But maybe they can be untagged manually, without calling in Trogdor? There is career-development for questions about "how do I become an awesome mathematician", and an assortment of other meaningless tags attached to other soft questions. Advice! Learning! Life-Universe-and-Everything! – user147263 Aug 1 '14 at 8:27

Resolved(?): has been merged into (renamed) . (There are surely a number of questions which should have this tag removed.)

The wiki of tag says "For question about limit theorems of probability theory, like the law of large numbers, central limit theorem or the law of iterated logarithm."

Yeah, right. For calculus students, "limit theorems" means statements about limit of sum, product, etc. They vastly outnumber those dealing with limit theorems of probability, and they don't read tag wikis.

I think if this tag is to survive, it has to be renamed to something less calculus-y. I suggest , which has 25 characters. (For the pluralization s, see Jeff Atwood.)

Any other suggestions?

• Agreed. Tag names should be less vulnerable to misunderstanding, especially those that calculus students are likely to use. Starting the tag name with "probability" should make things clearer to first-time askers. – Joonas Ilmavirta Sep 28 '14 at 20:34
• What about [probably-limit-theorems] instead? :-P – Asaf Karagila Sep 28 '14 at 22:27
• The state of the tag either called for a complete change in its definition, or at least a temporary change. The intent of the tag is now somewhat more clear by its name, though if better name suggestions pop up further changes can be made. – user642796 Oct 5 '14 at 6:52

Resolved

is the ultimate sophistication, said Leonardo da Vinci.

Is this a useful tag? If we want to keep it and use it for simplification of algebraic equations, then would be a better name.

• To quote Frank the Rabbit, "Burn it to the ground". – Asaf Karagila Jul 31 '14 at 20:32
• I have pinged the user, who probably created this tag. Just in case he wants to defend why the tag is useful. – Martin Sleziak Aug 4 '14 at 4:50

Do we really need both and on Meta? Looks like almost all of 31 questions using the latter also use the former.

So I propose (tagging)←(tag-management)

• Indeed, the description of (tagging) says: "If your post at meta is about suggesting new tags, choosing correct tags for some question, suggesting removal of some tag, this tag is appropriate for such question." – user147263 Jan 1 '15 at 16:36
• IIRC tag-management was created by putting the tags tag-synonyms and tag-merging together. Maybe we could keep separately the questions of the type "What belongs into this tag?" and the questions of the type "Should these two tags be synonyms?", since they are somewhat different. – Martin Sleziak Jan 1 '15 at 19:38
• @Martin Well, it seems there are actually few questions of the type "What belongs into this tag?" — and they often also discuss wether this tag should in fact be a synonym of smth / removed altogether... – Grigory M Jan 1 '15 at 19:44

I think that can be merged into one of the tags related to formal languages and whatnot.

Resolved: was removed from all questions, and the synonym suggestion has been deleted (before doing this it still appeared in the tag list). The tag no longer exists.

Apparently is a thing. I think it shouldn't be.

(Maybe merge it into is a good idea?)

• Shall we start by making the tag not a thing, or will that not suffice? – Tobias Kildetoft Mar 20 '14 at 11:53
• It should be obliterated from the utter existence of the universe. We will redo the big bang and slightly modify the starting conditions until this tag is no more!! – Asaf Karagila Mar 20 '14 at 11:59
• It seems that the tag was added on several occasions (and maybe also created) by an experienced user. Perhaps it would be good to get his input. I left a comment on one of the posts he edited. – Martin Sleziak Mar 20 '14 at 14:39
• I created this tag. I was probably in one of my more whimsical moods when I did so. The intended use is not so much for elementary set theory question as the sort of questions like "Is the empty graph connected?" or "Why doesn't Bourbaki's definition of a topological space explicitly include the requirement that the empty set and the full set be open?" [Answer: because of conventions about the empty union and empty intersection which imply this.] Such questions have a similar feel, and I thought that having the tag could be helpful to avoid duplication of content. – Pete L. Clark Mar 20 '14 at 15:52
• I admit that I then did not go back and systematically add the tag to anything like all of the questions on the site which concern nullology. That would have been a lot of work, and in view of the somewhat unfortunate feature that changing a tag bumps a question, would have flooded the main page of the site with nullological questions, which is sort of the opposite of my intent. – Pete L. Clark Mar 20 '14 at 15:55
• But I still think the tag could be useful. And it has a fun name... – Pete L. Clark Mar 20 '14 at 15:56
• Looking back at the very small number of questions which I tagged nullology, it seems like my own intention for the tag were not carried out very well: I apologize for that. – Pete L. Clark Mar 20 '14 at 16:00
• @Pete: Had I noticed this tag earlier, I would have probably raised the issue on meta earlier. I don't think that this tag is really needed. – Asaf Karagila Mar 20 '14 at 16:37
• @Asaf: I am sure that the tag is not really needed. The question seems to be whether it could be useful to have it. (Even there I don't have strong feelings...) – Pete L. Clark Mar 20 '14 at 18:22
• The questions currently tagged nullology seem to all involve (elementary) set-theoretic aspects of $\varnothing$. Being a non-standard term, I really don't see any value in keeping it around. And no-one has expressed a strong desire to keep it around. Simply emptying the tag would appear to be a reasonable thing to do. – user642796 Sep 3 '14 at 8:16
• @Arthur: I've proposed a synonym just earlier today. – Asaf Karagila Sep 3 '14 at 8:34
• @Asaf: If I understand your last comment correctly, you've seen the light and want me to delete the tag synonym suggestion. – user642796 Sep 3 '14 at 10:45
• I started emptying out the tag just now because I noticed it on a new question and it seemed to be just cruft. Only afterwards did I discover this discussion -- fortunately it seems that my actions align with consensus :-) – hmakholm left over Monica Sep 3 '14 at 13:17

Resolved: Synonym approved!

Is there a real difference between (four questions; no wiki and excerpt) and (plenty of questions, tag excerpt)?

My guess is that the former was a typo (someone clicked enter too fast), and we can delete it. But I'm not quite sure.

Bump: Can someone please cast the last vote?

• You may notice that both sequences and sequence are among suggested synonyms for (sequences-and-series). – Martin Sleziak Sep 7 '14 at 22:32
• @Martin: Thanks. At least one of them is now approved. Maybe we can merge the singular into the plural, and get it over with? – Asaf Karagila Sep 7 '14 at 22:33
• here you go... – draks ... Sep 18 '14 at 21:01

Please vote this up if you think we need a new thread («Tag cleanup 2015»).

• I wanted to do start a new thread with a proposal for a 2015 cleanup thread, and a request that we summarize all the unresolved issues from the current thread, and bang them out as quickly as possible. – Asaf Karagila Jan 1 '15 at 18:28
• @Asaf Are there any unresolved proposals left here? (Beside just proposed tagging<-tag-management) – Grigory M Jan 1 '15 at 18:31
• @Asaf Please feel free to edit meta.math.stackexchange.com/questions/19037/tag-cleanup-2015 – Grigory M Jan 1 '15 at 18:34
• Well, it's not clear to me that all of them are resolved. Maybe we need to go through those without a "Resolved" banner on top, and see what's up with them. – Asaf Karagila Jan 1 '15 at 18:34
• @Asaf Oops, there are indeed a lot of unresolved cases... And making synonyms w/o moderator superpowers is hard.. – Grigory M Jan 1 '15 at 18:47

We have and , both about the same size, neither has wiki or excerpts.

Do we really need both of them? (And can someone write a wiki for the one[s] we keep?)

• I have posted some thoughts on (network) tag here in chat. (I did not wanted to put here too many long comments.) – Martin Sleziak Mar 20 '14 at 8:04
• Thanks for the elaborated reply. – Asaf Karagila Mar 20 '14 at 10:51