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I don't have the privilege to propose tag synonyms, so let me post this as a meta question: Do we need the tags and separately? They seem synonymous to me.

I will leave two comments below for simple yes/no votes.

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    $\begingroup$ Yes, they are synonymous. $\endgroup$
    – Joonas Ilmavirta
    Oct 1, 2014 at 11:59
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    $\begingroup$ No, they are different things and should be kept separate. $\endgroup$
    – Joonas Ilmavirta
    Oct 1, 2014 at 12:00
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    $\begingroup$ Thanks for bringing this up. IMO even if you had the ability to propse it on the main site it is good to bring it up here. The synonym voting is pretty hidden and restricted. It does not work well (or at all) on its own except possibly on huge sites. $\endgroup$
    – quid Mod
    Oct 1, 2014 at 12:46

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To document what happened:

A tag was created.

The old tag was split and does not exist anymore.

The old tag was merged into the new tag

The above was discussed before.

In the process also noted the new tag and thought it is now superseeded by and I thus removed it. If you would like to keept it feel free to recreate it (it was just on the one question).

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  • $\begingroup$ I created the tag language-use to mean something other than terminology. This question deals with use of language in a way that is far from captured by the word "terminology": matheducators.stackexchange.com/questions/4475/… I think there is a difference and I am considering adding the tag again to my question, but other opinions are welcome. $\endgroup$
    – Joonas Ilmavirta
    Oct 7, 2014 at 11:00
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    $\begingroup$ Sorry about that! I undid the removal. A way to make the scope and purpose of tags more clear is to write a tag wiki, at least a brief tag wiki excerpt. It would be great if you could write one for this or these tags. $\endgroup$
    – quid Mod
    Oct 7, 2014 at 11:25
  • $\begingroup$ That's ok. I should have created a tag wiki when I created the tag, so I only have myself to blame. I wrote an excerpt, so the meaning of the tag should be clearer now. Let's just hope there will be more questions of this kind in the future so the tag will stay alive... $\endgroup$
    – Joonas Ilmavirta
    Oct 7, 2014 at 13:26
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I feel that terminology (the names we give objects) and notation (the symbols we use to describe objects) are different things and should have different tags. That is, I propose we remove the tag and add a tag .

Added later:

I agree with the examples given by Brendan Sullivan in the comments.

I was going to respond to quid's comment below by saying:
"Right now there are only a few questions on the site and so it would make sense to have just one tag for both concepts, but in the future when there are more questions, it might make more sense to have two separate tags to allow more specific searches. Starting with two tags now would eliminate the future problem of trying to re-tag the older questions."

But I realized that I was thinking in "mathematician" mode and not in "mathematics educator" mode. If the use of terminology in education and the use of notation in education are similar, then I would have no problems with using just one tag for both concepts.

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The current situation seems unfortunate and I think some change should be made. At the moment there seems no clear consensus yet, but there is also one aspect that was not yet brought up.

I will try to summarize the situation as I see it and propose several solutions.

At the moment we have the tag and

This situation feels strange as the latter is a subset of the former and the situation is asymmetric in that there is no tag (except there is one in some sense, see below)

Two scenarios:

  1. Keep only

  2. Keep create , delete

One could envision still other things but these seem the two options. I have a slight personal preference for the former (which seems to be shared by some), but there are also some that would prefer to keep the tags separate and when in doubt I think we should rather keep (meaningful) tags. Thus, I propose to go for 2.

There is an additional issue, namely there is a tag it has only two questions at the moment. It was introduced for a question asking about some terminology in mathematics education (as opposed to mathematics itself), yet then the second questions seems to use it for mathematics terminology.

It is not clear to me how to proceed. Assuming we go for 2. above, the two main options seem:

  1. We could only have for all questions of terminology.

  2. We could have for mathematical terminology and keep for education terminology. (Perhaps the should then be also decorated with mathematics in some way?)

What are opinions on this? (Mine is as often rather for fewer tags, so 1.)

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    $\begingroup$ I also prefer to have just one tag for terminology. $\endgroup$
    – Joel Reyes Noche
    Oct 4, 2014 at 3:20
  • $\begingroup$ Thanks for the opinion @JoelReyesNoche If there is no dissent in the next days I'll go ahead and implement the proposal as above. (In any case we are only talking about a few questions at the moment; changes are not yet a big deal.) $\endgroup$
    – quid Mod
    Oct 4, 2014 at 15:31
  • $\begingroup$ Sounds good. If there are no opposite opinions in the next days, go ahead. $\endgroup$
    – Joonas Ilmavirta
    Oct 5, 2014 at 7:18
  • $\begingroup$ I agree with your proposals: Scenario 2 and Option 1 :-) $\endgroup$
    – Brendan W. Sullivan
    Oct 6, 2014 at 13:23

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