Quality-based tag for novice questions

Question

After cleaning up a few facepalm coding questions from novices, I failed to find an existing appropriate tag to distinguish such questions. Quality-based tags do exist however, (i.e. the "humor" tag), so the question is what would be the most useful name for such a tag or tags?

Terms that come to mind:

• novice
• newbie
• learner-programming
• learner-(name of programming language)
• learner-English
• showMeTehCode
• humor-unintentional
• not_even_wrong

Some of those might needlessly offend some users, and are therefore doubtful.

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Michael Mrozek notes that SE once had Meta-tags, which were often abused and were thereafter abolished. Therefore any quality-based tag that survived that purge should not be construed as a model.

Are there any general demographic impressions as to how those Meta-tags tags were abused? That is, was the problem universal? Did the tags corrupt any who read or used them, or was there some conspicuously errant minority or majority?

(If the problems were not general, then it suggests a question of non-general meta-tags -- tags that require permission (i.e. reputation or whatnot) to write, or perhaps read.)

Answer 1

I'm not sure if this is a serious question, based on the tag name suggestions, but no. It took Stack Overflow years to eradicate meta tags. I didn't even know we had a humor tag, but it's fortunately unused; I'm not sure why it wasn't automatically removed by the system.

Answer 2

My objection to this idea is not about their being meta-tags, as such, it's more about their being finger-pointing tags. The only thing these tags would convey is that, in the opinion of the tagger, this question is not up to snuff. If a question is bad, downvote it. That's what votes are for.

I see absolutely no benefit in using tags to publicly shame users. Not to mention the issue of deciding a question's "quality". Who gets to choose? What is a beginner for you? Maybe what you consider a beginner question is too advanced for someone else. Or, perhaps, what you consider advanced looks trivial to a third person. These are all very subjective issues.

The objective of tags is to i) help categorize questions and facilitate searching and ii) guide experts to questions on their subject matter. A quick rule of thumb when thinking about creating a new tag is to ask yourself whether there could be any experts in the tag's subject matter. I think it's pretty obvious that there will never be any experts in any of:

• novice
• newbie
• learner-programming
• learner-(name of programming language)
• learner-English
• showMeTehCode
• humor-unintentional
• not_even_wrong

These are all "shaming tags". There can't be any experts in any of these things and tagging with such tags would have no benefit whatsoever and would only make people feel bad. So no, don't create such tags. Edit, or downvote or vote to close as appropriate and move on.

Answer 3

Tagging such question looks a bad idea.

We've all have been (or still are somehow) newbie. Be it in unix, iphone, gardenning, whatever. I wouldn't put too much emphasis on newby question.

Either

• question is too broad (I want to compile my very own kernel, how do I start ?), unclear etc, then it is put on hold.
• question is legitimate, but often ask (how I redirect a command ? ) then we find the dupplicate.

once in a while, a good one arise.