Chat session and discussion on tag removal

David Z

Jul 25, 2017 16:00

Welcome all to our biweekly chat session!

Please hold unrelated discussion until after we have finished with the prepared topics

Here's the agenda for today's session:

1. Intro, welcome newcomers, site questions (5m)
2. Recent physics developments (10m)
3. Tag maintenance (?m)
4. Open discussion

Qmechanic

@DavidZ : Concerning agenda, I would like to ask the community for permission to replace the word 'burnination' with 'blacklisting' in this 2013 meta post. The point is that the definition were probably not spelled out properly at the time.

0celoñe7

Hello, my name is 0celoñe7

David Z

@Qmechanic sure, that can be part of our tag maintenance discussion (and perhaps a meta post too)

0celoñe7

I am 0celo7's Latino brother

David Z

For now, is anyone here new to the site, new to chat, or new to chat sessions?

0celoñe7

Jul 25, 2017 16:02

@DavidZ See above

Anonymous

@0celoñe7 Welcome. Are you any different from your brother? :P

David Z

Anyway... moving on, what's new in the world of physics?

John Rennie

If anyone has 90 minutes to spare I think this is good fun:

Where in the World are SUSY & WIMPS? - Nima Arkani-Hamed

►

The talk gives a nice history of approaches to unification, and Arkani-Hamed is an entertaining speaker.
(though I understand not everyone is a fan :-)

0celoñe7

If anyone has hours and hours to spare, this is amazing.

David Z

@JohnRennie Is it really only 90 minutes? :-P

John Rennie

Jul 25, 2017 16:08

At the end of the talk Akrkani-Hamed says "I meant this to take only 45 minutes" :-)

David Z

Haha, figures

0celoñe7

@JohnRennie I once tried to explain quantum mechanics to my statistics teacher in high school

I had intended for it to take 45 minutes

It took way longer

David Z

I was thinking it'd be fitting if the listed video length were only 45 minutes but it went on for longer

I saw him give a seminar once and although it was interesting, it went for fully double the allotted time

I suppose most people have seen the pictures of Jupiter's great red spot?

John Rennie

:-) There is a part II but it focusses on split supersymmetry and is less interesting to the non-susy phenomenologists amongst us.

→ 1 message moved to Physics Meta

David Z

3 messages deleted

Terry Bollinger

Jul 25, 2017 16:14

1 message deleted

David Z

OK, well, if there's nothing else, let's talk about tags. There have been some assorted proposals for curating or removing tags raised on meta over the past week or so.

Emilio Pisanty

@DavidZ there have

David Z

6

Q: Tag burninate requests for voting

As suggested by Natheniel in Redundant tags I, I'll make a single question and let people vote on the answers (containing redundant tags to burninate.).

This is the place to put tag removal requests, although as @Qmechanic suggested, perhaps we should change the wording to "blacklisting"

Emilio Pisanty

@DavidZ I disagree - I think it should explicitly call for both burnination and blacklisting

Qmechanic

@JohnRennie : Nima Arkani-Hamed is indeed always a great speaker. I'm curious: Was this talk recommended to you on some website?

Emilio Pisanty

Jul 25, 2017 16:17

However, the key problem with that one is that there is no clear criterion for success

What conditions must an answer to that thread fulfil for the process to kick in?

Qmechanic

@EmilioPisanty : That would work for me.

David Z

@EmilioPisanty As I understand it, the point is that blacklisting includes burnination, but personally I'm not opposed to listing both

Emilio Pisanty

And, if there are no such conditions, what's the point of the thread?

David Z

@EmilioPisanty We have to figure that out.

Emilio Pisanty

And seriously, why is a single catchall thread needed?

Why can't individual tags be dealt with on separate threads as they get brought up?

that would enable much freer discussion on the pros and cons

I appreciate where that thread came from, via centralcharge's lengthy series of requests with lots of tags in them, but that's not where we are nowadays

David Z

Jul 25, 2017 16:20

That's another thing to discuss. Personally I'd be fine with saying that new requests for tag removal be made in separate threads, but the ones that are already on that thread we should handle as they are.

Qmechanic

@EmilioPisanty : I guess it is on the Phys.SE mods discretion at some point contact to the SE team, if they deem the proposal has a realistic change of being adapted.

Emilio Pisanty

@DavidZ sure, that's fair enough

Qmechanic

@EmilioPisanty : because there is too many.

Emilio Pisanty

@Qmechanic Well, on the part of the SE team it's just pushing a button, after making sure that there is indeed a consensus

@Qmechanic too many burnination requests?

David Z

@Qmechanic I don't think there are too many these days. New requests come up quite rarely.

Emilio Pisanty

Jul 25, 2017 16:22

the last one was posted four years ago

Yashas

I think separate threads draw more attention than a single thread.

Emilio Pisanty

@Yashas they don't draw attention because they come once in a blue moon nowadays

Qmechanic

@EmilioPisanty : I'm only interested in blacklisting. Burnination is alway implicitly implied for me.

Emilio Pisanty

If you're in this kind of regime, sure, take steps to rate-limit the thing. If you're in nothing-happens-for-four-years mode, though...

@Qmechanic Either way. Too many what?

Qmechanic

@EmilioPisanty : Not actually now, but potentially too many in the future.

Emilio Pisanty

Jul 25, 2017 16:25

@Qmechanic Well, if it becomes an issue then, we can deal with it as it comes up

As it stands now, the implicit message is "Tag cleanup is impossible on this site"

I would like to think that that's not how mods see the issue

Qmechanic

@EmilioPisanty : Come-on. Everyone forgot about this for 4 years.

Emilio Pisanty

@Qmechanic yeah, precisely. So why are we worried that there'll be a flood of requests?

Qmechanic

@EmilioPisanty : Because it is hot now.

ACuriousMind

@EmilioPisanty I think Qmechanic is worried that once we get rid of one tag, people will suddenly "remember" that's an option and flood meta with new requests, while you see the inactivity in the past as evidence that that won't happen. Honestly, I can't tell who's more likely to be right.

Emilio Pisanty

@ACuriousMind well, as I said, if it becomes a problem then we can deal with it when it becomes a problem.

As it is, the message with dupe-closures like this one is: yeah, that's not happening.

David Z

Jul 25, 2017 16:30

FWIW it seems like Stack Overflow deals with this by individual request questions (example)

And that leads us to Shog9's recommended procedure for burnination requests, which does specify one tag per question - although it would be legitimate to argue that this is meant for SO and may not apply to other sites.

But I do think that procedure would make sense for us too.

Emilio Pisanty

@DavidZ that's on MSE. If it was meant for SO only, it'd be on MSO.

Qmechanic

The mods haven't really discussed this, but fellow mods, @DavidZ ,@ACuriousMind, ..., would you agree to send a concrete request to the SE team, with a handful of obvious blacklist & burninate requests, first and foremost general-physics, to get the process started?

Emilio Pisanty

> There are a lot of burninate-requests posted to various meta sites...

David Z

@EmilioPisanty Good point, though there are things that get posted to MSE and "in name" are meant to apply network-wide, but nevertheless were decided only by looking at SO.

Emilio Pisanty

@DavidZ Either way, the phrasing on that post makes it pretty explicit that it's meant to apply network-wide.

David Z

Jul 25, 2017 16:35

@Qmechanic I think the real issue is determining a standard at which a blacklisting request should be considered "accepted"

ACuriousMind

@Qmechanic Sure, but we need to establish meta consensus on these tags first regardless of how obvious they are. Currently I only see possibly the two top-voted suggestions on the collected thread qualifying for that

David Z

@ACuriousMind I'd include the third one, too

ACuriousMind

@DavidZ It was migrated from MSO to MSE by Shog himself, I think that should tell us we don't need to argue it could theoretically be only meant for MSO ;)

David Z

food at +7/+0

Emilio Pisanty

@DavidZ not anymore.

Qmechanic

Jul 25, 2017 16:38

@DavidZ : it seems difficult to give clear-cut general criteria. It is much easier to discuss special actual tags.

David Z

@ACuriousMind cc @EmilioPisanty Ah yeah... what I meant and should have said is that sometimes things which are posted on MSE and meant to apply to all sites nevertheless don't make sense for sites other than SO, or for non-programming sites, or for some set of sites that may include ours. Though I do think this particular post does make sense for our site.

Emilio Pisanty

As far as the existing thread goes, the clear consensus is on physics-careers and general-physics, and I think it's pretty clear that there is a strong onus to deal with them now that it's come up.

As far as the rest goes, it's not clear what constitutes consensus on that specific thread, but it does tend to be much easier to tell whether there is or is not consensus on a proposal when it's on a separate thread

i.e. positive score of $\gtrsim$ 5 on the question, no significant downvote component, no significant opposition on comments or answers

you know, the usual deal

David Z

@EmilioPisanty Sounds reasonable to me.

Emilio Pisanty

How about we close Tag burninate requests for voting and add a message linking to the MSE faqs on burnination and blacklisting

David Z

@EmilioPisanty also sounds reasonable to me

Emilio Pisanty

Jul 25, 2017 16:41

and then future requests can be posted on their own meta threads tagged burnination-request with success criteria as usual

Qmechanic

@EmilioPisanty : There could be cases were an ignorant majority is oppressing a minority tag.

Emilio Pisanty

@Qmechanic Agreed. Then it's important to look at the content of any pushback in comments and answers.

David Z

What I'd suggest is that once a tag removal request has community support, according the criteria proposed by Emilio or similar, then the mods manually review it and if we think there is no reason to override that request, then we forward it on to SE. This gives us an opportunity to "veto" the removal request if it looks like the "ignorant majority" situation is happening.

Emilio Pisanty

@DavidZ that sounds good to me

Qmechanic

@DavidZ : Agree, but I don't think we should adapt a specific voting limit.

David Z

Jul 25, 2017 16:45

Another relevant link from MSE:

19

A: How should we make tag blacklist requests?

The procedure is as follows: First, burninate the tag, if there are currently questions tagged with it. If there aren't currently questions tagged with it, you probably don't need to blacklist it - but see Step #2. Once the tag is gone - no longer used on any questions - decide if it needs to ...

Emilio Pisanty

I think we have a rough consensus on future procedure?

David Z

Sounds like it

Emilio Pisanty

OK, so, can I ask that we move on to the top scorers on the existing requests?

David Z

@Qmechanic Yeah, we do have a general idea of what constitutes "consensus" from other debates, and it tracks with what Emilio suggested except for the 5-vote minimum.

Emilio Pisanty

the first is general-physics, which is currently just short of wiped out

24

Q: How do you start learning physics by yourself?

I think this question has its place here because I am sure some of you are "self-taught experts" and can guide me a little through this process. Considering that : I don't have any physics scholar background at all. I have a little math background but nothing too complicated like calculus I am...

soft-question education general-physics

locked, needs a mod to remove the tag

1

Q: Does physics address the topic of consciousness?

Does physics address the topic of consciousness? For instance, does physics say anything about how it might arise or what might be its qualitative properties? I'm wondering because it's interesting how certain combinations of particles are conscious (at least apparently) while others are not.

soft-question general-physics biology

David Z

Jul 25, 2017 16:47

@EmilioPisanty We should look at general-physics+

or, was that changed back? hm

Emilio Pisanty

could use some additional attention to the tags

1

Q: Publication Authorship Credits

Many physics papers now have dozens of authors per paper. Experimental physics may have multi-organizational and multi-country contributing staffs, but I'd guess that most of the names don't contribute a word or equation to a paper, yet they get individual authorship credit. My question is who de...

soft-question general-physics

I would argue should be tagged physics-careers and then closed

and that's it for general-physics

Qmechanic

@DavidZ : Yeah, the only plus tag is currently math-phys.

David Z

Ok, good

@EmilioPisanty done

Emilio Pisanty

So all that's left is to handle those last two and request the blacklisting

David Z

@EmilioPisanty That one I just deleted so we don't have to worry about the tags on it

@EmilioPisanty not sure how best to handle that

Emilio Pisanty

Jul 25, 2017 16:50

@DavidZ that feels a bit extreme

shouldn't it remain but under historical lock?

David Z

Well but then we'd have to figure out appropriate tags to put on it

Emilio Pisanty

well, soft-question and physics-careers would do OK

and then it just lumps it into the next item in the agenda

David Z

If it's off topic, and significantly so (which I think it is), we don't lose much of anything by deleting it

@EmilioPisanty both tags which I have very strong objections to :-/

Emilio Pisanty

@DavidZ well, the answers are valuable, I should think

and that's what historical lock is meant for anyways

David Z

@EmilioPisanty I don't agree with that

though I guess I shouldn't argue with the votes

Well, I undeleted it for now anyway

Emilio Pisanty

Jul 25, 2017 16:53

@DavidZ hear me out on physics-careers and I think you'll see the point

David Z

OK...

Emilio Pisanty

there's currently 39 questions with that tag, all closed

many of them upvoted and with multiple upvoted answers

originally on topic

but no longer so

which is precisely what historical lock was made for

so

put a historical lock on all of them

and then, if it is at all possible, blacklist the tag so it can't be added to new ones, but without removing it from the existing locked ones

that way we retain the existing archive of the site, with clear markers that similar questions will no longer be received (and a clear signpost to Academia where they probably will be), and so that the tag cannot come back.

Qmechanic

So @DavidZ , @ACuriousMind , ..., concretely, as a start, should we contact SE team to b&b physics-careers and general-physics?

David Z

@Qmechanic Sure

Emilio Pisanty

8

Q: Let moderators use blacklisted tags on historical questions

The Stack Exchange team has the ability to blacklist a tag even when the tag still exists. With the combination of Shog's new tag-specific popup messages, some tags which are blacklisted now have messages that accompany why they are blacklisted. The tag is still kept around for those questions wh...

feature-request edits moderator-tools tag-blacklist

this seems to be possible

so just lock all physics-careers before you blacklist

David Z

Jul 25, 2017 17:00

@EmilioPisanty But that's not precisely what historical locks were made for. They're meant for "stellar" questions which have exceptional redeeming value despite not being on topic. Not that "stellar" correlates directly to votes, but I'm thinking more like 25-score questions, not 5-score questions. Most physics-careers questions don't come anywhere close to that.

By the way, our allotted time for the chat session is over. See everyone in two weeks! We'll continue this discussion on tags for those who would like to stick around.

Emilio Pisanty

@DavidZ so what do you reckon?

delete them all?

David Z

@EmilioPisanty All the questions? I'd say examine the top 5 or so for possible historical lock, and delete the rest. Though if we can have the tag blacklisted (I mean, forbidden for future use) without removing it, the deletion isn't so important.

Emilio Pisanty

@DavidZ or maybe we can ask for a mass migration to academia?

that last bit does look to be possible

David Z

@EmilioPisanty Eh... that's questionable. No guarantee that all the questions would be on topic or desirable on Academia, and some of them may have duplicates there anyway. Plus as a rule we can't migrate questions older than 60 days; I'm sure SE could override that, but I doubt they would want to.

One thing we could do is, if we find (open) duplicates on Academia, edit in a "manual duplicate notice" that points to the question there.

Since you pointed out that it does seem to be possible to have a tag blacklisted but not burninated, maybe we can just have physics-careers blacklisted for now, and then we can discuss what to do with the old questions with that tag. cc @Qmechanic

Emilio Pisanty

BTW there's about 900 total rep on the tag.

not that removals will affect people much

but still

David Z

Jul 25, 2017 17:11

I suppose that's a good point against deleting unnecessarily. Well, it looks like 200 of that rep is associated with deleted users anyway, and other than that, no more than 105 to any given user

Emilio Pisanty

@DavidZ yeah, on closer inspection, it's not that impactful

I guess this guy/girl won't be happy

grad student

49 1 2

education physics-careers soft-question

but otherwise

David Z

Still, that is enough to push me over in favor of dealing with this without mass deletion if we can - and it looks like we can.

Emilio Pisanty

@DavidZ cool

I guess that's mostly it for now?

We haven't discussed the + tags

or tag review queues

but those sound like topics for another day

David Z

Yeah... well, I'm worn out for now, I agree to defer those to another day.

Qmechanic

@EmilioPisanty : OK.

Emilio Pisanty

Jul 25, 2017 17:16

@DavidZ one last bit, what's your thoughts on changing tags on this one to careers and then it can be lumped in with the others?

1

Q: Publication Authorship Credits

Many physics papers now have dozens of authors per paper. Experimental physics may have multi-organizational and multi-country contributing staffs, but I'd guess that most of the names don't contribute a word or equation to a paper, yet they get individual authorship credit. My question is who de...

soft-question general-physics

it's essentially the same situation the way I see it

David Z

Yeah, if the tag is going to be blacklisted anyway, I don't mind

Emilio Pisanty

cool

The h Bar

Participants