Would it be useful to have a tag for exercise problems and questions about standard textbook material?

Question

Would it be useful to have a tag for exercise problems and questions about standard textbook material, or other educational material, like online courses and the like?

The idea would be to use them to tag a certain type of questions, namely questions relating to educational material in the field of quantum information and computation. It should not matter whether these are actual homework or not, and the tag name should be chosen accordingly.

The advantages I see would be that it would allow for an improved filtering of questions (which is a key purpose of tags).

• We have a fair share of users who are new to the field. For them, this would allow to find answers to textbook-level questions which they might be looking more easily. (That is, they could choose a topical tag + the "exercise" tag to find corresponding answers.)
• Users who are interested in providing good canoncial answer to standard material can find them more easily. Having good answers to these questions is very valuable, so I think the site could profit from that.
• Users who don't like to see those type of questions can avoid them more easily, and thereby be directed to the research-level questions. This could make the site more attractive to expert users who would like to focus on those type of questions.

So I think there is a number of advantages to having such a tag.

There might be potential issues with the fact that the tag is a bit diffuse -- where exactly do we draw the limit of "textbook-type questions" -- but I am optimistic that this can be settled. I also feel that even if such cases exist (like for many other tags!), these would not tend to lead to emotional discussions, as it is the case for the [homework-and-exercises] tag on physics. The latter (even if not meant to be like that) gives the impression to assign blame for posting homework. This is not at all my intention with this tag: The idea is solely to mark a certain type of problems, namely those which are considered educational and appear in textbooks, exercises, online courses, etc.. The tag should not assess whether this is actually homework, nor make the impression it does.

A key question would be to have a good name (not [homework-and-exercises]!). I would imagine something like textbook-and-exercises), but I am entirely open to suggestions!

Note that we already have a nielsen-and-chuang tag now, which seems well accepted, so tags of that kind seem fine on this site. Basically, I am asking for a more broad version of this tag which would encompass other textbooks and learning resources.

Answer 1

I am not entirely convinced that adding such a tag would allow to satisfactorily filter out textbook-like content. At the same time, I don't see any compelling reason to not have it, provided we stay away from any wording that might appear "judgemental", or otherwise pertaining to the intentions of the asker rather than the content of the post. If having such a tag would make some people more eager to participate and stay on the site, I say let's go for it.

A few thoughts:

• What would the tag achieve? Provided we manage to maintain it properly (which should not be taken for granted imo), it would allow to filter out a specific type of questions. Moreover, it would make it easier for someone looking e.g. for solutions or discussions about a given textbook problem to find what they are looking for. It might even make it easier to find duplicate questions.

• Would it be effective? This depends a lot on how consistently it is used. These types of questions have a good chance of being asked by unexperienced users and not be tagged adequately. It would be up to higher rep users to edit in the tag where due. On physics there is a relatively small number of users which valiantly retag a lot of questions. I honestly do not know how much the consistent use of their "homework-like" tag relies on a few users enforcing it, but I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of it is thanks to them. All this to say: if you want it, be prepared to maintain it.

• The issue of it being a meta-tag. To be honest, I don't completely understand the way tags are classified as "meta". Going with the definitions here, "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.)". However, an "exercise-like-question" tag would describe the content of the question, exactly like, say, quantum-information does. It would also not be more subjective than many other tags. I guess it would be a "dependent tag" (again going with the definition given in the link), but the same could be said for many others (again, quantum-information is an example). Regardless, the main argument against meta-tags, as far as I can tell, is their being subjective and/or useless. This would not be the case for an exercise-like tag.

• What wording should we use? I would go with something simple, e.g. exercise or exercise-like. Something like textbook-exercise could also be fine, but then what about exercises not coming from a textbook? At the same time, almost everything could be argued to be some form of "exercise", whereas a "textbook exercise" refers to something more specific, so even if not entirely accurate, that wording might be more apt to the purpose.

• What about all the exercise-like questions that have already been asked?" Mass retagging is a rather boring exercise. Just saying.