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Thanks a lot for your warm and kind words, colleagues and e-pals. I hope that there will also be contributions in the future and many people will also be made happy and fewer people will be provoked by my (and other) answers!
And congratulations to quantum mechanics for having earned the gold badge – this sometimes underappreciated princess of the 20th ...
24
Yes, we should.
"Homework" isn't the issue
I think we all agree that whether or not a post comes from a homework assignment is irrelevant, as illustrated by this example question:
Consider a transmon qubit with capacitance C and Josephson junction critical current I_c. What is the matrix element <1|Q|0> for this system?
I might be motivated to ask ...
17
I agree with a strong caveat. The tag wiki excerpt must function as an exceptionally well-tuned tool to catch the great homework/problem-solving questions, turn the borderline cases into good questions, and prevent bad questions as far as possible.
The way tag synonyms work at Ask a Question time is the following. You type in the tag you think you should ...
14
There's been an awful lot said here already, so I'm gonna cut to the chase: popular-science is clearly a meta tag, in the same way that homework is a meta tag - it can't stand alone when describing a question.
That doesn't necessarily mean it's bad or should be removed though. [popular-science], like [homework] has value in describing the sorts of answers ...
14
The physics-careers tag seems redundant and confusing, since questions asking for career advice are off-topic and I see little other uses for it. It also (weakly) suggests career advice questions are on-topic here, which may have led to this question being asked recently.
Should we get rid of it?
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I think there is one real (or at least, really potential) issue with problem-solving: it could be applied to almost every question on the site. Presumably people wouldn't go around editing it in willy-nilly, but it is likely that new users will apply it without discrimination to their questions.
I'm thinking "Oh, I have a problem, and I'd like it solved". ...
answered Sep 19 '13 at 2:39
dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten
81.4k1 gold badge33 silver badges86 bronze badges
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Your first obstacle is that you need 1000 reputation points to create a new tag. If you think a tag is missing and don't have 1000 reputation points, you can suggest it in this meta post.
If you have 1000 reputation points, there might be another obstacle: Certain words are blacklisted, e.g. physics.
Returning to OP's specific question, a 'physics' tag would ...
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How about homework-and-exercises? It is self-explanatory, and that way we still call a spade a spade while simultaneously leave open the possibility that it might not be actual homework.
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I) In 99 percent of the cases, the homework tag runs smoothly and as intended. In a few cases, OP does not agree with labeling his question with the homework tag; often it's a new user that hasn't read the wiki description or the site policy, but sometimes OP is right and the homework tag is removed again from the question with no further discussion.
II) In ...
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Yep, I've thought that this might be useful. I just didn't have any particularly good ideas for what the new tag should be. I was thinking homework-like, so let this answer be the proposal for that. (Although to be honest, I think problem-solving sounds better.)
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My take on this is two-fold:
First, don't start edit wars. If you put something on a question, and somebody later removes it, don't just go back in and put it back again and leave comments about it. Take it to meta, take it to chat, and actually discuss it rather than take it out to 7 revisions. When people disagree, use the channels we have to resolve it ...
10
There should be no either/or duality :
either we close all the offending questions, or we bring back the metaphysics tag for good.
The degree of offense is what should be the criterion, and the voting and comments should help you as a moderator to gauge that. If some are offended it is OK, one cannot please everyone.
This philosophical definition of ...
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You may edit in the homework tag (suggested edit if you don't have the rep) if you see a post like this. The important thing is that if the post looks homeworky to you, then check if it obeys the homework policy (it should show some effort on the OP's side, highlight the concept, and mention the OP;s level of understanding). If it doesn't, flag as "too ...
10
Yes we should get rid of the theory tag.
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I won't address the legal issues (because I'm not qualified), but in general, it's not a violation of any SE policy to link to anything.
However, in the interest of maintaining professionalism, I would suggest that if you want to identify a specific book, you should link to the Amazon product page or some similar canonical identifier, not to a site that ...
10
Let's look at some data:
In the past 365 days, 15 tags have been created by users with less than 1000 reputation at the time of creation and then used more than once:
Name Used User Link Created RepOnCreation
------------------------- ---- ------------------------------ ---------- -------------
klein-gordon-...
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I can't think of anything else that the teleportation tag would be used for, at least not within the scope of actual physics (and hence of this site). Unless there is some such thing, yes, I'd say go for it.
Of course there do seem to be some existing questions with the teleportation tag which quantum-teleportation would not apply to. Most of them are ...
10
nmr
Pro: the abbreviation is widely understood and recognized.
Con: it's better to have longer tags that are self-explanatory instead of just initials.
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No, what you suggest is not what this site was designed for. If you want to have a discussion, take it to chat or to some other webpage. Cheers!
answered Mar 11 '18 at 22:14
AccidentalFourierTransform
37.6k1 gold badge10 silver badges27 bronze badges
9
1) If one has enough reputation points, it is possible to directly propose tag synonyms. (Note in particular, that reputation points in the corresponding master tag are needed.) In OP's concrete example, one should go e.g. here or here.
2) Alternatively, if one doesn't have enough reputation points, there is a meta post called Tag synonyms for voting. There ...
8
I think I'm against.
Reasoning:
thought-experiment wouldn't give you any data about the type of physics being considered, you'd still have to do a good job tagging the question with the kind of physics you are talking about that. In that sense this would be a meta-tag.
It would, however be very attractive the kind of poster whose entire understanding of ...
answered Jan 13 '13 at 6:15
dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten
81.4k1 gold badge33 silver badges86 bronze badges
8
If it's a philosophical question that depends on or is closely related to a physical theory then it should be allowed I think. It should be up to the poster of the question to relate the question to physics. So, my take is those questions where no attempt has been made to reasonably relate them to physics should be out, but otherwise should be allowed.
The ...
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Fixed.
In general, to report minor things like misspellings, etc, which do not require that the community should make a decision of principles, but it is clear what needs to be done, then one could just mention the problem in the chat room.
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I have the same objection to this that dmckee had last time we talked about this.
Essentially, everybody who posts a question on this site wants a problem solved. The problem may be lack of understanding, or it may be homework, or it may be just about anything else. But the very existence of a question implies there is a problem to be solved, and such a ...
8
No.
That would be a meta tag - it has nothing to do with the actual topic of the question, it doesn't help to define its scope, all it tells you is either "this question is based on a misconception" or "this user thinks they are confused". The former is entirely useless information, the latter is pretty much par for the course if you're asking a question.
...
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If you ask me, it's always been a bad idea. I'm pretty sure the only reason we have it is historical; it's one of those tags that gets created on every new site right in the beginning, before we figure out what kinds of questions we want. But these days, as you've noticed, pretty much anything that deserves the tag soft-question turns out to be off topic.
I'...
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For the time being for pragmatic reasons. Phys.SE used to have a quantum-computing and a quantum-computation tag, which were often misused by some users whenever they had to compute something in quantum mechanics. This practice stopped once they were redirected to the quantum-computer tag.
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As spelled out in Is non-mainstream physics appropriate for this site? we accept only questions about mainstream physics, where mainstream physics is defined as:
Mainstream physics is physics which has been accepted by a significant portion of the physics community. In the case of modern physics, if a theory has not been published in a reputable journal, ...
8
solar-wind has 80 questions, and tag badges are only awarded for tags which are used on 100 or more questions. Consequently, you also can't track a tag badge for solar-wind in your profile.
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
