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Related: (solution-verification) tag

I was recently considering adding the tag to one of my questions (with apologies for the shameless self-promotion), and got to thinking: is this a Meta tag? Should I not have used the tag?

On the face of it, this seems like it meets the burnination criteria because solution verification is a type of question, not a mathematical topic. Really, this tag could be applied to questions of virtually any topic. My question happened to be about combinatorics, but you could just as easily apply it to a question about real analysis or linear algebra or topology.

On the other hand, it could be useful for helping people find questions to answer (if there are active site users who like to answer that type of question).

Any thoughts? Should the tag stay, or should it be considered for removal?

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  • $\begingroup$ Just for reference, I will add also link to this FAQ item: The “meta-tags”. (Just in case some of the users reading this discussion do not know what is meant by a "meta tag" in this context.) $\endgroup$
    – Martin Sleziak
    Mar 29, 2019 at 5:33

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Any thoughts? Should the tag stay, or should it be considered for removal?

My personal opinion that if this type of questions is still allowed then we should probably keep also the corresponding tag(s).

  • It was discussed several times whether (and ) questions should be allowed on Mathematics Stack Exchange. See, for example Asaf Karagila's answer in What do you think is the largest problem facing Math.SE today (July 2015)? I suppose that at some point the discussion whether Mathematics Stack Exchange will no longer allow this type of questions is bound to happen again.
  • If, at some point in the future, we disallow solution verification questions, then the related tags have to be dealt with. I am not sure whether with burnination or simply preventing them from being added to new questions. But this is a question for the future - no decision disallowing this type of questions has been made yet.
  • While this type of questions is still allowed, the tag distinguishing them (and showing that it is a question which should be treated differently) can be useful. (Whether solution verification are in practice answered in the way they are supposed to be answered is a separate question.) This seems to be in line with the sentiment expressed in the accepted answer to this question: Would a tag for “check-my-proof” questions be useful? (Although this is a discussion from 2012, the views of the community might have changed since then.)
  • After all, while meta tags might be problematic, there are a few of them which the community on this site decided to keep anyway. So the fact that a tags is a meta tag does not automatically imply that it should be removed.
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  • $\begingroup$ Yeah, there has been some discussion (with apologies for further self-promotion) on Stack Overflow about whether or not "is this correct?" questions should be allowed, too, but it's a little different there because simply asking "is this correct?" without any further context basically amounts to "please test my code for me," which we don't really do. On the other hand, you can't exactly unit test your proof in Visual Studio before posting here. $\endgroup$
    – EJoshuaS - Stand with Ukraine
    Mar 29, 2019 at 13:33
  • $\begingroup$ Still, some of the same things I suggested in my SO Meta post (e.g. the fact that you should explain why you think that your solution might not be correct, rather than just posting some code and asking "is this correct?" with no further context). $\endgroup$
    – EJoshuaS - Stand with Ukraine
    Mar 29, 2019 at 13:34

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