@GaurangTandon well said

@Martin-マーチン So it's feasible

Not one of my absolutely absurd ideas like the

Greeting bot

uh oh, that's from an answer where I said

> tl;dr Close most, especially rote calculations. If it can be edited to not be an amirite, do so.

maybe...

> tl;dr ~~Close~~Delete most, especially rote calculations. If it can be edited to not be an amirite, do so.

Thanks, Stack Exchange!

@Martin-マーチン psh, I've only ever asked one question because I'm already a wizard

I think the real reason to have canonicals isn't so much to have a dupe target, but rather to have additional pieces of quality content.

@orthocresol "you need a criterion that is not called "effort"" yeah, so that's the direction I was headed to from our previous discussion. I was talking about a criterion to leave open "conceptual" questions, close "non-conceptual" ones

Martin and Avnish feel that the distinction between the two is reasonably clear. So, I feel a month-long experiment would help us concretely gauge if the community too is accurately able to identify conceptual questions from non-conceptual ones; if the amount of quarrels due to disagreement over conceptual closures is almost negligible as compared to the total number of the questions, we can consider the case to be won

@orthocresol I sometimes wonder if Klaus didn't face internal disagreements from the community for answering such questions :/ this question has ten downvotes, is closed, and is worthy of deletion, and yet it has an answer by Klaus. This is the same story for every second hw question we discuss to delete.

deleted: chemistry.stackexchange.com/q/97093

deleted: chemistry.stackexchange.com/questions/96454/…

@GaurangTandon Let the post you want to delete one-box, so that they are more visible. We'll edit them as soon as we have dealt with them

@Martin-マーチン okay, I've two messages from two days old that still need some activity: a and b - (should've oneboxed them too) - please have a look

:: chemistry.stackexchange.com/q/54550/4945 rm'd

delete this?

:: chemistry.stackexchange.com/questions/947 rm'd

delete this?

Is that where you are going at?

@GaurangTandon I believe the name is valid though: pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/Nitroprusside

@Martin-マーチン though Jan says it should be "sodium pentacyanidonitrosylferrate(III)" in his answer :/

the valency differs

I don't understand what we should be doing about that

@Martin-マーチン well, we can't change Jan's answer significantly when he's not around. so all I wanted was to verify that Wikipedia does indeed not state the IUPAC name, and so we should change the "as stated by Wikipedia is sodium pentacyanidonitrosylferrate(II)" to "as stated by PubChem..."

(I know this is a reletively minor nitpick though...)

I don't think we should change that. Does it really matter where the wrong information came from? It doesn't really change the question...

also i didn't pay much attention to the charge and pubchem only gives the ion

alright

We used to have a tag about Group-16 elements, didn't we? Where'd it go? I can't seem to find it on the tags page :/

I don't remember a tag like this

@Martin-マーチン I think it was called "chalcogens", analogous to the other tag we currently have (pnictogens). Can you please look up the deleted tags page (dunno if there's a thing like that) once and check if it is still there (in some different name if not chalcogen)?

@GaurangTandon as far as I can tell, no such tag existed. At least there is no orphaned wiki entry for anything like that

@Martin-マーチン :( maybe i'm mistaken then. mind if I create the new tag then? there's plenty of inorganic-chem questions that need a more specific tag for group 16

I'd prefer we have a discussion about these tags on meta. There still is that carbon-family, boron-family thing. I'd like to hear some opinions on that

@Martin-マーチン there's already quite a few tags that have meta-posts about them and that still need some discussion, so for the time being, i don't think creating a new tag will do any harm. None of them has yet reached even twenty questions, so in case there's disagreement, we can quickly change them. But it's still better than having no tags at all

that and you're yet to tell what you were worried about the "family" suffix to those two tags. i didn't use tetrels/etc. because that name is not well known enough, at least not at school/undergrad level

I think that tagging with the group will lead to the same disaster as with the functional groups.

@GaurangTandon It's named after the first element in the group, which is usually a terrible representative of the whole group

@Martin-マーチン okay, fine, then consider this scenario: I have a question tagged inorganic-chemistry, hydrolysis, halides. It is obvious that the hydrolysis of every group halide would be different (especially alkali metals vs carbon group), so how would you tell which group the question is about?

@Martin-マーチン ah...good call. we can certainly rename the tag later, but it seems you're more concerned about groupwise-tagging in general, so let's discuss that first

@GaurangTandon By the title?

@Martin-マーチン it does, but the entire point of tagging was to make questions easily categorized. so I should be able to look up the different questions pertaining to - say - group 16, but that currently is impossible. In org chem, atleast, I can look up questions pertaining to esters, nitriles, etc. but such categorical depth is lacking in inorganic-chem

The tags should help categorise things. While there can be made a case that there are specialist in group 3 chemistry, usually you are more interested in the chemistry, which can be quite different in the group. Don't get me wrong, I'm not totally against that, I just like to have that discussion, to avoid massive retagging later on

and for the names of the tag; I don't think we should focus on new users in the tagging system at all. Tags get added or removed all the time by more advanced users, it does absolutely not matter whether a new user finds the right tag at the very beginning.

for everything else there should be a wiki excerpt/usage specifying stuff

@Martin-マーチン ah, right (we can discuss that later, though, "carbon group" seems to be the accepted one - even though it's a misnomer. If it wasn't then the name of that WP article would be whatever else you called it)

@GaurangTandon yes and no. If you are looking for the hydrolysis of AlCl3, then a triels tag won't help you that much either as it'll show a lot of chemistry completely unrelated to that reaction as this group does a lot of different chemistry. And if the triels tag would be the only one your applying, how good can the question actually be?

@Martin-マーチン no, I would rather use four tags: inorganic-chemistry, hydrolysis, halides, triels

and using esters also shows a lot of different reactions of esters to me, but I know by using that I just want to see the chemistry of esters, so the same logic applies to triels

hmmm k

sounds good to you?

not sure, I'm not really keen on these tags in the first place. I don't really know how to use them. If I'm looking for something, then it's easier to construct a meaningful search. And I find those tags not specific enough to watch them.

I get you, I never use tags to search for any of the questions myself. But then tags weren't for searching in the first place, they were made for proper categorization of questions,...so we should keep our categorization as proper as we can. "inorganic-chemistry, hydrolysis, halides." is broad, and "inorganic-chemistry, hydrolysis, halides, silicon" is too specific. Turns out, "inorganic-chemistry, hydrolysis, halides, tetrels" fits perfect