Misuse of tag "divergence": How to deal with questions with the wrong tag?

Question

According to the tag info of divergence, it is used when questions are about vector calculus. However, it is often tagged with convergence, at questions about convergence/divergence of sequences, series, or improper integrals. Here are such examples:

• Determine if $\sum_{n=0}^{\infty}(-1)^n\frac{n+1}{n^2+1}$ converges or diverges
• Find the radius of convergene R for power series
• Finding the value of an unknown from a summation of an exponential
• Summation problem: $f(x)=1+\sum_{n=1}^{\infty}\frac{x^n}{n}$
• Nature of infinite series $ \sum\limits_{n\geq 1}\left[\frac{1}{n} - \log(1 + \frac{1}{n})\right] $
• Why does a u-sub go wrong when finding values for q such that $\int_{1}^\infty x^q e^{x^{q+1}} dx$ converges or diverges?

If there questions were few, then I would edit them directly. However, I don't know what an effect occurs when I edit many questions all together. What can I do to solve the problematic situation?

Answer 1

Proposal: Changing the tag name to something more descriptive might make it clearer to the user what the tag is intended for and thus incorrect use will be less likely. (And thus reducing the frequency of this problem in the future.) I would suggest divergence-vector-calculus or divergence-vector-field or something similar.

This is the same suggestion as previously made in the Tag management 2017 thread. (It was suggested to remove the tag completely in the post Do we need the “divergence” tag? - this was before the tag-info was created.)

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I will point out that moderators can change the name of a tag without bumping any questions, for details on this see: Can you change the name of a tag? (It is also possible to remove all instances of a tag, this is called burnination.)

However, even if the tag-name is changed, the questions which are tagged incorrectly have to be retagged manually.

However, I don't know what an effect occurs when I edit many questions all together. What can I do to solve the problematic situation?

It is recommended not to bump many questions at the same time - see How much bumping is too much? and other related discussions. So in situations like this, a solution might be to "bookmark" the question in some way and do a few of them each time - and return to the list and continue editing later. This might be easier if there is a simple way to find such questions and you do not have to compile a list manually - for example, in this specific instance the questions tagged divergence+sequences-and-series are very likely among the questions that need retagging. I will add a link to this question (which was asked partly as a reaction to this post): What do you use to mark questions that need editing when you want to avoid excessive bumping?

Answer 2

Alternative proposal: Remove this tag.

There are a only approximately 500 questions with this tag, which already refers to only one very specific operation in elementary vector calculus, or calculus on manifolds, for which we also have appropriate tags which are much larger.

In my view, a good tag should carve out an area of mathematics or topic relevant to the community (such as limits-without-l'hopital, a common question we've discussed on meta in the past), while remaining sufficiently broad. Many questions with this tag already contain other relevant tags, and the only ones I can find that do not refer exclusively to calculations in vector calculus. This suggests to me that the divergence tag is often simply something that arises in another problem, perhaps in probability or PDE, where using this tag feels somewhat analogous to using a tag for algebra on a problem involving any formal manipulations.

This would also eliminate the confusion discussed in the other answer, distinguishing vector calculus divergence from divergence in the sense of sequences or series.

Answer 3

Non-solution. Nobody seems to have proposed editing the tag description as a solution, which is good, because it doesn't work. Over on [cs.se], we have a bunch of tags for programming languages which basically say, "If your question is about how to write programs in this language, your question is off-topic". We still get "How do I write this program?" questions using these tags. Of course there's a heavy selection bias, here, since people who read and understand the tag description won't post their question.

_{How to vote on this answer is left as an exercise for the reader. Do you vote up because you agree that editing the tag description won't work? Down for the same reason? Who knows?}