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There are a lot of tags which are too oddly specific and not really about a specific idea in physics, e.g.

We don't need a name for every thermodynamic and kinematical variable.

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  • $\begingroup$ Possible duplicate: meta.physics.stackexchange.com/q/4007/2451 $\endgroup$ – Qmechanic♦ Aug 10 '13 at 4:32
  • $\begingroup$ @Qmechanic: I don't that I can propose this entire list on that question . $\endgroup$ – Abhimanyu Pallavi Sudhir Aug 10 '13 at 4:33
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    $\begingroup$ If one asks n question simultaneously, there are 2^n possible yes/no answers. Since there are not going to be 2^n answers, but at most a handful of answers, if a voter agrees with roughly half of a proposed answer, how is he/she meaningfully going to vote up or down wrt. to an individual question? $\endgroup$ – Qmechanic♦ Aug 10 '13 at 4:52
  • $\begingroup$ @Qmechanic: So do you mean I need to ask a separate question for each tag? $\endgroup$ – Abhimanyu Pallavi Sudhir Aug 10 '13 at 5:02
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    $\begingroup$ @Qmechanic It's better to have them all in one post (I suggest merging the three redundant tags questions into this one), and seeing the answer votes. I doubt that people will post all 2^n answers, we'll probably have 3-5 and some comments. $\endgroup$ – Manishearth Aug 10 '13 at 6:20
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    $\begingroup$ Why not ask a single question, "which tags should we burninate?" and put each tag in an answer? Then people can discuss and vote on them individually without having to make dozens of separate questions. $\endgroup$ – Nathaniel Aug 14 '13 at 10:28
  • $\begingroup$ @Nathaniel: That seems like a good idea... $\endgroup$ – Abhimanyu Pallavi Sudhir Aug 14 '13 at 11:21
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I tend to agree with @Qmechanic here: if there is any need for discussion, lumping all these tags into one post becomes unwieldy. I'm sure not gonna burn a big pile of tags like this.

I also agree with David Z here - if a tag describes part of the topic of a question, then it's a good tag. There aren't too many; you're not gonna run out. This notion that everything on the site should be lumped into a tiny handful of tags is somewhere between misguided and harmfully stupid.

If you have a good reason to believe that a specific tag is unnecessary or harmful, post about it here - folks will discuss it if necessary and then it can be removed.

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  • $\begingroup$ Here, all the tags are of the same kind . $\endgroup$ – Abhimanyu Pallavi Sudhir Aug 10 '13 at 18:01
  • $\begingroup$ So what? Doesn't mean they're all good or all bad. $\endgroup$ – Shog9 Aug 10 '13 at 18:51
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    $\begingroup$ If momentum is a bad tag, so would velocity would be a bad tag too . $\endgroup$ – Abhimanyu Pallavi Sudhir Aug 11 '13 at 6:47
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    $\begingroup$ You don't even have velocity listed in this question. Nor are you explaining why momentum is a bad tag. Why are these tags even bothering you? $\endgroup$ – Shog9 Aug 11 '13 at 16:27
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    $\begingroup$ velocity, momentum are just examples . The tags are bad because they don't show anything about the post . What does momentum show? That the post mentions momentum ? Pretty irrelevant, as newtonian-mechanics would be well enougph . $\endgroup$ – Abhimanyu Pallavi Sudhir Aug 11 '13 at 16:39
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    $\begingroup$ @Shog9 I agree that we dont have to worry about the number of tags. But good physics tags should denote subfields / concepts / methods or more generally physics keywords used by and meaningful to physicists. Having man-made things such as aircraft, fan, etc or more generally tags that just denote everyday things makes Physics SE look very unprofessional, at least to physicist and physics students. Tags that just denote very basic thermodynamic or kinematic variables are some kind of too localized, they are covered by thermodynamics and kinematics respectively. Not sure, if I was $\endgroup$ – Dilaton Aug 12 '13 at 15:43
  • $\begingroup$ able to explain this good enough, but physicists know what I mean. $\endgroup$ – Dilaton Aug 12 '13 at 15:44
  • $\begingroup$ @Dilaton: I've no problem with using tags for subfields, concepts or methods if that's what y'all want to do (just be consistent when using them). However, that does not preclude the use of more specialized tags. There are people following some of these tags - are you seriously arguing that they don't know what their own interests are? $\endgroup$ – Shog9 Aug 12 '13 at 15:52
  • $\begingroup$ @Shog9 I like and appreciate specialiced physics tags too, nothing wrong with this. But the more specialized tags should still denote keywords applied and used by physicists and not random everyday things. I just recently realized that the number of non-physicsy tags is quite large and well populated, with not negligible numbers of followers, etc and to me this is some kind of shoking. I guess that the increase in the number and use of these tags goes together with the since the beginning of the year ramped up "popularization" of the site and the growing share the non-physicist part of our $\endgroup$ – Dilaton Aug 12 '13 at 16:02
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    $\begingroup$ Why should there be some sort of keyword restriction on tags, @Dilaton? And who is the arbiter of keywords? Who decides if a given word is "physicsy enough" for the site? If, for the sake of example, someone decides they want to answer angular-momentum questions, why shouldn't they be able to do so? $\endgroup$ – Shog9 Aug 12 '13 at 16:05
  • $\begingroup$ community takes. People who have not a large physics knowledge of their own are often the ones who bring up such tags, denoting rather the everyday application of physics they are interested in than the physics field/concept/etc that has an explanation for these questions. There is nothing basically wrong with such questions, we even have an everyday-life tag etc ... But I still think on a physics site these even everyday-life questions should be properly tagged by physics tags. Often such questions are asked with only "aircraft" and similar tags, and no physics tag at all because people $\endgroup$ – Dilaton Aug 12 '13 at 16:07
  • $\begingroup$ asking such questions just dont know enough about physics itself to choose any good physics tags ... $\endgroup$ – Dilaton Aug 12 '13 at 16:08
  • $\begingroup$ @Dilaton: You're writing too much for me to follow; why not break this out as a separate discussion: "How physicsy should tags on this site be?" or some such... $\endgroup$ – Shog9 Aug 12 '13 at 16:10
  • $\begingroup$ To answer the comment, angular-momentum is not that basic, so it is good enough just in my opinion. There is also not to much harm in having some not so useful tags, but the number and use of them is largely ingreasing. The first tags site would look strange to any physicists, if it were exclusively populated by tags like aircraft, train, fan, velocity, temperature, etc and it would leave a strange impression on visitors, namely that this site is just about aircrafts, fans, trains, etc $\endgroup$ – Dilaton Aug 12 '13 at 16:14
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    $\begingroup$ Well, this is the problem with lumping a dozen different tags into one discussion, @Dilaton: even if some of them are crap, it's difficult to have a reasonable discussion for the group as a whole. $\endgroup$ – Shog9 Aug 12 '13 at 16:15
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I generally agree with this answer and the idea, that the tags we have should denote subfields of physics or meaningful keywords as applied by physicists.

But tags just denoting thermodynamic or kinematic variables, basic quantities used in certain subfields, etc look to me not meaningful enough to categorize qustions. In addition, creating such tags for every thermodynamic and kinematic variable or for every basic quantity applied in any subfield would largely inflate the number of tags we have.

Concerning the particular tags listed here, it seems to me that the thermodynamic variables are already covered by , the kinematic variables by , capacitance by , etc ...

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