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It seems to me that there are not a lot of new questions on "elementary set theory"?

Have new tags been created? which would explain this apparent evaporation...

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  • $\begingroup$ Acording to @MartinSleziak: "It seems that now the sites gets about 600 questions per day, which means 50 new questions in 2 hours." // so the slow activity could be just for elementary set theory $\endgroup$ – Bellatrix Dec 3 '19 at 18:22
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    $\begingroup$ Maybe it used to be tagged better. I certainly see a bunch of elementary problems about functions or relations that don't get the elementary set theory tag. $\endgroup$ – Matthew Daly Dec 3 '19 at 19:24
  • $\begingroup$ By new badges do you actually mean new tags? Otherwise this question doesn't really make sense to me right now. $\endgroup$ – Arnaud Mortier Dec 3 '19 at 19:36
  • $\begingroup$ @ArnaudMortier. I actually meant " new tags". $\endgroup$ – Saint James Dec 3 '19 at 19:50
  • $\begingroup$ I most stopped looking at that tag. I mostly am close to the elementary number theory tag badge. $\endgroup$ – Roddy MacPhee Dec 3 '19 at 19:58
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    $\begingroup$ "It seems to me...." Before I'd get too worked up about this, I'd want something more solid than "It seems to me". $\endgroup$ – Gerry Myerson Dec 3 '19 at 22:45
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My understanding is that most of the time, someone who asks a question on an elementary topic will not be able to name precisely what the relevant tags are. In such cases, it's all up to more senior users to tidy things up. But then not all questions get re-tagged properly

  • because there are too many of them,
  • because not everyone thinks of taking care of the tags when they tidy up a question,
  • because people sometimes don't see the point as they believe the question will be not received well and disappear soon,
  • because perhaps those who do take the time to re-tag properly don't have that particular one - - in mind at the moment.

By the way I took the liberty to add the tags and to your question.

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  • $\begingroup$ sometimes there are too many combinations of tags possible. $\endgroup$ – Roddy MacPhee Dec 3 '19 at 21:34
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Using Data Explorer (SEDE) you can check how has the number of questions in some given tag evolved over time. Here are two queries, one showing absolute number of questions in the , the other one showing percentage of all question which have this tag. The latter is taken from here: A statistical question about statistical questions.

One might be also interested in questions in a given tag which have lower quality. Of course, it depends on what you decide to take as an indicator of quality, but you can check, for example:

For comparison, here are similar queries for all questions (not restricted to a specific tag): average score since 2012, number of closed questions, percentage of closed questions, number of deleted questions, percentage of deleted questions

You can find some other SEDE queries related to tags here on meta. Apart from SEDE, you can find number of questions in some date range also by search - for example, all questions or closed questions in one month (in this tag).

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  • $\begingroup$ The graph just goes to show how much students care about asking questions only when it has an impact on their grades. $\endgroup$ – user21820 Dec 4 '19 at 3:53
  • $\begingroup$ It would be interesting to see a tag's quantile, with tags sorted according to the above indicators. $\endgroup$ – Arnaud Mortier Dec 4 '19 at 9:56
  • $\begingroup$ @ArnaudMortier Do you mean something similar to the query from this answer: Best and worst tags for % answered rate? The query from that post shows percentage of unanswered questions for various tags. So what you're looking is something similar, but with percentage of closed/deleted questions? $\endgroup$ – Martin Sleziak Dec 4 '19 at 10:22
  • $\begingroup$ Exactly! Impressive. $\endgroup$ – Arnaud Mortier Dec 4 '19 at 10:31
  • $\begingroup$ @ArnaudMortier I am afraid that similar queries (looking at closed and deleted questions instead of unanswered questions) might be beyond my SQL skills. But I will give it a try when I have a bit mor time that I do have now. $\endgroup$ – Martin Sleziak Dec 4 '19 at 10:32
  • $\begingroup$ By the way it seems surrealistic that linear-algebra is both the tag with most unanswered questions and the highest rate of unanswered questions $\endgroup$ – Arnaud Mortier Dec 4 '19 at 10:33
  • $\begingroup$ I was thinking of replacing UnansweredCount with DeletedCount or something like that. I'll try to see if I can figure it out by looking at the syntax of other queries. Thanks for the great help! $\endgroup$ – Arnaud Mortier Dec 4 '19 at 10:35
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    $\begingroup$ @ArnaudMortier For closed questions I found a query in an older post on meta: Which tags have the largest proportion of closed questions? It seems that this query does not include duplicate close votes, only other closures. I have tried to create a query of my own which can be restricted by date range and counts also duplicates. $\endgroup$ – Martin Sleziak Dec 5 '19 at 9:13
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    $\begingroup$ I think that creating similar query for deleted questions might be more difficult. Or at least it cannot be done in a similar way as the above query for closed posts - the PostTags table does not contain deleted posts. I have asked in the SEDE chatroom $\endgroup$ – Martin Sleziak Dec 5 '19 at 9:13
  • $\begingroup$ For deleted questions I guess it makes sense since only users above some rep threshold can see them. Thanks for the links, that's awesome. I'm surprised that some tags with high expected closed rates such as collatz don't appear at all in the list - oh, got it, that's because of the min question count which is currently 1000. $\endgroup$ – Arnaud Mortier Dec 5 '19 at 9:35
  • $\begingroup$ @ArnaudMortier Perhaps it would be better to continue this in chat, so that we don't leave too many comments here. $\endgroup$ – Martin Sleziak Dec 5 '19 at 9:40
  • $\begingroup$ When discussing this further in chat we managed to get also some queries for percentage of deleted posts for all tags. (With help from SEDE chatroom.) Here are the tags with 1000+ posts, tags with 10000+ posts. $\endgroup$ – Martin Sleziak Dec 6 '19 at 9:43

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