-6

Meant for questions that should be easily understandable by all speakers of a language used.

I've asked a question I think fits it.

My hope is that it will be used for keeping both questions and answers simple. I have not added a wiki yet.

Any other ideas for this tag?

Edit: added a wiki to the tag, to try to clarify further. Currently I am -5 and now understand why the tag is unneeded. My proposed wiki is below:

A tag to signify an attempt to simplify a complex idea to be easily understood by any reader proficient in the language used. Obfuscation is not welcome here. Clarity and conciseness are required. Each word should have a distinct purpose and flowery prose should be discarded, unless directly quoting a well known philosopher.

8
  • I don't understand the value of this tag but may be others can suggest something. – virmaior Jul 10 '15 at 4:52
  • 1
    "Simple" tag? I don't think that will fly here, it's far too subjective. Our tag system works great for things like "Kant" and "philosophy of mind" (concepts that are more concrete). A concept can be simple to one person and complex to others. It is basically meaningless without this context. – stoicfury Jul 10 '15 at 5:54
  • @stoicfury good points all, but the intent is to simplify complex ideas, to concisely and clearly communicate ideas accurately. – hellyale Jul 10 '15 at 6:14
  • @stoicfury can you read the proposed wiki description and let me know if you think it could be tweaked to make it here? – hellyale Jul 10 '15 at 6:29
  • How does adding a "simple" tag help though? All posts on this site should be as accessible and concise as possible. I honestly just don't think it adds anything. :\ – stoicfury Jul 10 '15 at 7:29
  • @stoicfury maybe it doesn't, I thought it was a good idea, but the community thinks otherwise. Oh well. – hellyale Jul 10 '15 at 7:59
  • No worries, it's great you want to improve the site. :) If you have any other ideas don't hesitate to share them with the community.:) – stoicfury Jul 10 '15 at 17:26
  • I don't see how this tag would help users filter questions that are of interest/significance to them, which is one of the purposes of tags. – Dave Jul 10 '15 at 20:02
4

Let's leave aside the meta-ness of the simple tag. The other problem with it is that every question and every good answer to every question should be "simple" - it should not contain superfluous details. It should get to the point. It should use technical terms when necessary (and provide references to more obscure technical terms or references).

The end result of a tag such as this is that it's a seal-of-approval for content. But for that, we already have a mechanism: the up-vote! If there are questions that are meritorious, we should be in the habit of upvoting them, not tagging them with their merits.

6

I removed the tag and rejected the tag wiki edit before having read this post. That maybe wasn't the most polite thing to do, for which my apologies. However, I still don't think this tag is a good idea.

Since 2010 the use of meta tags is discouraged. I think I mentioned this also when we discussed adding a tag. The following is taken from the blog post I linked:

The reason meta-tags are a problem is that they do not describe the content of the question. They describe some other aspect of the question, like the author's skill level, or the author's motivation for asking it, or generally what "kind" of question it is (poll, how-to, etc.).

Meta-tags are actually a subset of a larger problem that I usually call dependent tags. These are tags that don't say anything by themselves - you can't tell what the question is about unless they're paired with some other tag (or several of them). These tags are a problem because people don't realize this and will often use that as the question's only tag.

And that's why

From this point on, meta-tagging is explicitly discouraged.

How can you tell you're using a meta-tag? It's easier than you might think.

  1. If the tag can't work as the only tag on a question, it's probably a meta-tag.
  2. If the tag commonly means different things to different people, it's probably a meta-tag.

Instead of using a tag, you could just mention in the post or in a comment that you are looking for simple answers (for example, because of your own level, or because of your language skills). Often, however, this will already be clear from the way the question was posed.

1
  • this clears things up. Thanks for taking the time to answer. – hellyale Jul 10 '15 at 9:03

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