Since it has been a while since the last tag cleanup, I was curious to see if there were specific tags that needed fixing or general issues with tags. I wanted to get other users' thoughts on some of the observations I had made. If any of these points are controversial, we can spin them off into their own separate discussion. Otherwise, if there is general agreement, we can use this as a list of tasks to work through. This can be done at a fairly leisurely pace or at a designated time to avoid retaggings flooding the front page.
General
- A large number of tags don't have usage descriptions or tag wikis. Unlike retagging, adding these won't bump any posts, so this can be done anytime.
- Many of the tags that do have usage descriptions actually seem to have essentially a short tag wiki in this spot (e.g. matrix, algorithm, scipy) and don't actually describe what sorts of questions would be on topic. For these, I think the description should be moved to the tag wiki and a real usage description added to describe what sort of questions are/aren't on topic.
By tag
Format taken from this Academia meta post
| Tag | Wiki | Issue | Suggestion | Action |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| solver | No | This seems like a very generic tag that doesn't say much about the problem and there are other tags like linear-solver that cover more specific case. Almost any question on the site is effectively about "solvers" for a particular type of problem. | These questions should just be tagged with the type of problem (ode,linear-system) or the specific solver program being used. | Deprecated. All questions are retagged. |
| complex/complex-analysis | No | They seem to be used more or less interchangeably (or at the same time) for any problems involving complex numbers. | Convert complex to complex-arithmetic, add Wikis. | complex-analysis wiki added, complex is now a synonym for complex-arithmetic |
| numerics/numerical-modeling | No | Two of the most used tags on the site, but its not at all clear to me what the difference between the two is. | Previous Meta post has discussed removing numerics in some way. | |
| differential-equations | No | While this doesn't need to be removed, I think a lot of questions with this tag could be given more descriptive, specific tags | Use ode, stochastic-ode, pde, dde (though this could use tag info and possibly be changed to delay-differential-equation) | Recommend specific tags in tag description |
| experiment | No | Only on 7 question, no clear use case | Remove or clarify tag description | |
| update | No | Same as experiment | Could be used for questions about low-rank updates | Added wiki |
| roots/rootfinding | No/Yes | The first has no description, but roughly equal number of questions. Almost all the questions I see for roots are about root-finding, so these could probably be made synonyms. | Synonymize | |
| scaling | No | It seems to be used for two distinct types of questions: those about the time "scaling" of some method/algorithm and those about "scaling" or normalizing values during a calculation. | The former of these should probably be tagged complexity, while the latter could use this tag | |
| condition-number/conditioning | Yes/No | Seem to cover the same topic | Synonymize | Added wiki, switching some questions to use complexity |
| geometry/computational-geometry | Yes | Seem to cover the same topic, with geometry being used less and 36/62 questions with this tag also having computational-geometry | Synonym geometry-> computational-geometry |
The description changes are something anyone can do, provided they understand enough about the tag. The actual synonymization or retagging will require some coordination or mod assistance to expedite the process.
