9

The homework tag was deprecated from Stack Overflow just over a year ago - should GIS Stack Exchange follow suit?

Rather than repeat too much of the discussion of what led Stack Overflow to burninate this tag on over 20,000 Questions (we have 19), I propose a show of hands to guide our moderators on what the community feeling is here.

A recent GIS Meta Question prompted this one but I had been thinking about the thorny issue of "homework" (including tagged) Questions prior to that.

| |
19

Vote for this Answer if you think the tag should be burninated.

| |
  • Upvoted this while working on homework, ha! – Paul Nov 17 '13 at 20:39
  • 4
    I feel that it should be burniated, because it is a meta tag. It doesn't tell us what the question is about, and hence is pretty much useless. – Devdatta Tengshe Nov 18 '13 at 2:51
  • 2
    I agree that it is useless as a meta tag. However, on the main site it can be useful in that it lets individuals decide if they want to help someone with school/home-work. – user3461 Nov 18 '13 at 15:50
  • 7
    @GeoKevin I feel that it shouldn't matter if it is Homework or not. What matters is, is it a good question or not. – Devdatta Tengshe Nov 19 '13 at 3:41
  • 1
    @Devdatta On some sites--math especially--tagging a question with homework is meaningful and useful, because it signals that the asker wants guidance and hints but does not want a fully detailed answer. Although this option is of less importance here on GIS, retaining the tag for such purposes might be useful. – whuber♦ Nov 19 '13 at 15:33
  • 2
    @whuber I suspect this could also be achieved more explicitly by saying something at start or end of Question like "I am only after guidance and hints and not a fully detailed answer because this is for homework" – PolyGeo♦ Nov 19 '13 at 21:18
  • That would partly work, but would not help future users who might be looking for (or looking to avoid) such threads. That is the particular advantage of a tag: it limits the keywords one has to search for. Also, tags have wikis that can help guide users. We might accomplish what you seek more simply and easily just by modifying the homework tag wiki in a suitable manner rather than destroying the tag altogether. – whuber♦ Nov 19 '13 at 23:56
  • @whuber that's a positive aspect to the homework tag I'd not thought of (guidance/hints) - and clearly VERY positive with respect to the aims of this site. It might be difficult to get askers to ask 'limited' questions (or at least phrase the limits properly) or answerers to hold off on solving every last aspect of the question (I feel that the tendency of late is to give 10% or 110% of the answer, little in between!) - maybe we could use a different tag that implies these limits? – Simbamangu Nov 20 '13 at 3:36
  • 1
    @Simba The stats site changed the name of homework to "self-study" in order to cope with this issue. The problem has not been getting askers to limit their questions, but restraining gung-ho answerers from providing too many details! – whuber♦ Nov 20 '13 at 3:39
  • @whuber 'self-study' is a great alternative word, thanks for raising it. – matt wilkie Nov 22 '13 at 17:21
  • 1
    Agreed, now how do we go about making it a reality? Do we need consensus to add it as a tag (given that there's fairly overwhelming support to get rid of "homework" here), or just go ahead and create it? – Simbamangu Nov 27 '13 at 16:20
4

Vote for this Answer if you think the tag should be retained.

| |

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .