It seems like tagging voltage conveys useful information, namely that the question is about voltage. It seems a bit like saying an electron tag would be useless on a chemistry site because everything has electrons - yes but you're not tagging it electron because it has them, you're tagging it because electrons are what you want to talk about.

It also doubles as a noob-filter. This takes some cooperation from non-noob users to avoid tagging voltage and instead use something like high-voltage-transformer. But then you can hide questions tagged voltage to avoid a whole class of noob questions (a more realistic alternative to having an actual basic-question tag which many will not appreciate and resist).

matthewsnyder‭ The problem is the purpose of tags. As I wrote in a post on EE.CO, tags should convey structure, i.e. they should allow a user to discover questions about the same (or at least similar) topic. Tags should not be some sort of keyword list. When you display the question tagged with some tag and you see a wild variety of questions, that's a sure sign of that tag not fulfilling that role. voltage is one of those tags. I wrote also a post about that and similar tags.

The problem of "newbie shepherding" is that it requires human resources, which is scarce on codidact at the moment. We need more domain experts and their time is valuable for writing answers and curating posts that need an expert to look into them. While a bit of retagging is "part of the job", the more we avoid wasting their time the better. So letting people know that a tag is not useful is part of that strategy.

Well, that's my point. It would be work to get newbies to tag their question newbie-question. But it's no work at all to get them to tag with vague tags like voltage, they already do it automatically. Being newbies, they don't have enough knowledge about the field to know the more specialized tags. Therefore, you can use these vague tags as a negative filter which requires a lot less retagging from site regulars.

The one caveat is if experts are not aware that the tag is being used as a newbie detector, and inadvertently get their question filtered. But that's only a small subset of questions (about fundamentals) from a small subset of experts (those that didn't get the memo) who are themselves a small subset of all users. So the task of "get experts to avoid the vague tag" seems much easier than "get newbies to stop using the vague tag".

Nothing against newbies btw: In domains where I'm an expert, I'm occasionally in the mood to answer basic newbie questions. Other times I'm bored of the basic stuff and only want to see the "meaty" stuff. It would be nice to have a way of filtering those, that works based on the natural default behavior of people, and without having to use potentially patronizing tags like newbie-question.

Also in areas where I am a newbie, I like the ability to conspicuously mark my question as a newbie question and avoid creating noise for the experts who don't care.

I don't see anything in the EE meta post's specific guidelines that would really prohibit the tag voltage, and I don't see how the principle "tags should not be a keyword list" derives from those guidelines, and I'm not entirely sure why it's a problem to tag in a "keyword" way - I mean, if it helps with search....

All of that said, however, I can see where a tag like voltage lacks specificity. I think that what you'd really want, for the kinds of beginner questions you'd get there, are tags like voltage-measurement (e.g. practical aspects of using a multimeter), voltage-determination (e.g. computing the expected potential difference between two nodes in a circuit diagram) etc.

I would hate to see tags like newbie-question on any CD site. Aside from being self-deprecating and subjective, it doesn't help with understanding - it's a plea for "gentle treatment", which would be noise if the question included it. We should calibrate answer "difficulty" to the question.

As someone who could be accused of being an expert in at least one thing: the tiresome thing about questions from newbies isn't the difficulty level of the material, nor the volume of questions: it's the presentation. Tagging a question to say "hey, this is a newbie question from a newbie!" would be more aggravating, not less, because I would feel bad about filtering the tag and then I'd be seeing a system-endorsed way of doing the distracting thing that I want not to happen. The way to fix newbie questions is to make them beginner questions instead, by editing them to meet quality standards. I think Stack Overflow generally has the right idea in that the standards are primarily based on clarity and focus. The "what's the problem?" questions should become "why is this a problem?", and the "how do I do this?" questions should have useless attempts removed. Either way, "this" should be specified as much as possible.

Karl Knechtel‭ I agree with you about newbie questions. I wouldn't want to label them so. I think newbie should be educated to use the systems to their advantage and to the advantage of the community. A newbie could create a perfectly good question even on basic topics: for me the only hard requirement is that it should show sincere effort, for example no out-focus-images, no photos of hastily scribbled notes (but a good photo of a nicely written and drawn piece of paper is perfectly ok for me), no ungrammatical sentences (with exceptions for non-native speaker that try hard to convey their thought), no questions without even a reference to an attempted search on Wikipedia, no questions with blatant homework without even an attempt at a solution. Some slack could be cut for first-timers who don't know the site, but that's ok if they comply promptly with our requests to improve their post.

Karl Knechtel‭ In reply to your comment where you begin with "I don't see anything in the EE meta post's specific guidelines ...". I wrote that post and I stated somewhere in it that I created and proposed those guidelines on the basis that tags shouldn't be a simple keyword list. It seems that a mod and Monica Cellio (staff) agreed. My rationale is that a keyword systems doesn't necessarily convey structure, but it's just a random search mechanism. On the contrary Codidact tags, having synonyms and a hierarchy system, can be (and IMO should be) a different tool. You should click on a tag and you should see questions that have related topics, not questions that simply mention a keyword. The potential advantage of CD tags with their hierarchy system, is that they could foster a coherent learning path through topics.

Karl Knechtel‭ For example, say a user finds a questions about a buck converter. He gets curious and about the topic and clicks on the tag. This shows them other questions about buck converters, but the tag also refer to a parent DC-DC-converter tag. The user could follow it and learn about other types of converters, like a SEPIC, and so on.

That wouldn't be possible if the original post was marked, say, output, voltage, buck, converter. Clicking on converter, it could have shown also posts on, say, voltage-to-frequency converters, or impedance converters, in which the user is not interested.

To allow this type of tagging "philosophy" you must have tags that are not overly generic or ambiguous. I agree there are "problematic" tags like voltage which can have "legit" uses (if you have a question about the concept of voltage itself, for example), but are used (improperly) for topics that should be tagged with more specific tags (e.g. voltage-to-frequency-converter).