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When a tag has no questions related, or misspelled, or is not about physics, what can we do about it? Is there a way to flag it? Or to ask for deletion?

Examples: ,

EDIT: the mechancis tag seems to have been removed.

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    $\begingroup$ Do you feel mechanics and all to be useless?? $\endgroup$ – ABC Jun 3 '13 at 3:04
  • $\begingroup$ Not at all. I just found that spelling mechancis is wrong. And quant-ph should spell quantum-physics. Or should it be synonymized? $\endgroup$ – fffred Jun 3 '13 at 3:06
  • $\begingroup$ The mechancis is no tag on Ph.se $\endgroup$ – ABC Jun 3 '13 at 3:08
  • $\begingroup$ Well, it appears it has just been removed. Still, the question still holds. What should we do if that happens again? $\endgroup$ – fffred Jun 3 '13 at 3:19
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    $\begingroup$ In the case of "quant-ph" I think a tag synonym is best. I suggested one so if it gets enough up-votes it'll become a synonym of quantum-mechanics. $\endgroup$ – Brandon Enright Jun 3 '13 at 3:26
  • $\begingroup$ @BrandonEnright: Just added this in answer too, maybe you can suggest the synonym. $\endgroup$ – ABC Jun 3 '13 at 3:27
  • $\begingroup$ The quant-ph issue can be (and now has been) solved with an edit. $\endgroup$ – David Z Jun 3 '13 at 3:32
  • $\begingroup$ quant-ph is an Arxiv abbraviation and the used such things on the former theoretical physics SE. $\endgroup$ – Dilaton Jun 3 '13 at 9:12
  • $\begingroup$ Yeah, and if we had an established tradition of using arXiv identifiers as tags I would have been quite happy to keep it around. But we don't, so it's better to use the tags that are already common here. $\endgroup$ – David Z Jun 3 '13 at 18:54
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If a tag is misspelled or otherwise inappropriate (e.g. not about physics) and is only on one question, just suggest an edit that changes the tag to the correct spelling, or removes it, or whatever.

If an inappropriate tag is on two or three questions, you can just edit them all accordingly.

If a misspelled tag, or a tag which needs to be changed (not removed) for some other reason is on a lot of questions, there is a process by which you can suggest a tag synonym, and the community can vote on it. But that process is fairly well hidden. So in practice, the easiest thing to do is flag one of the questions for mod attention with a custom message.

If a tag needs to be removed outright from a large number of questions, without any replacement, that needs mod attention. So definitely flag in that case.

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  • $\begingroup$ What applies to Gödel, may also apply to two Schrödinger tags: schrodinger-equation and non-linear-schrodinger. The third one, schroedingers-cat, being "right" already. So, whatever you may think of the umlaut, as it is now, it is being used inconsistently. $\endgroup$ – Řídící Jun 3 '13 at 6:48
  • $\begingroup$ Ah, good observation. This would be a good use case for a tag synonym. Perhaps you could post a meta question to ask whether we should standardize on oe or o - it probably should be the former, of course, but we could run into an issue with tag length. Then after a while I (or another mod) will make a tag synonym and merge the tags into the properly spelled ones. $\endgroup$ – David Z Jun 3 '13 at 18:57
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As regards the tag, I see a link with a MathOverflow policy which asks all users to tag their questions using at least one arXiv subject area. While we don't have any such policy, I suspect some MathOverflow user applied the tag once, and it stuck.

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