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This question (How to make a salad olivier) has been tagged as "closed" a few hours ago. Is there a community consensus that tagging closed questions with "closed" is something we're now doing? I suspect, given that it's the only question tagged with "closed" that it's not. I've had a quick search through meta to see if I could find anything one way or the other, but haven't been able to find anything.

My opinion is that the tag is entirely superfluous and I'll be reverting the change dependent on the response I receive to this question.

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  • I agree, I saw that and considered doing it myself, but wanted to see if someone else would step up.
    – hobodave
    Jul 24, 2010 at 18:45
  • I've added a comment to the question pointing here. I see no value in a "closed" tag, but maybe there's something I/we're missing =) (that said, I doubt it!)
    – Rob
    Jul 24, 2010 at 18:46

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Reset to default
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Sounds completely useless to me. The question is closed and has [closed] in its title, what more do you want?

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  • My thoughts entirely - I just wanted to make sure there wasn't something I'd missed on here =)
    – Rob
    Jul 24, 2010 at 18:45
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This was a problem in the early Trilogy days as well. Tags exist to aid in searches (finding questions you can answer) and this tag is therefore totally superfluous. I removed the offending tag.

Please always remove any "meta-tags" you see. Some examples that are likely to come up are:

  • [offtopic]
  • [subjective] (useless on SO, even more so on a cooking site!)
  • [belongs-on-meta] (or any [belongs-on-xxx] tag)
  • [not-a-real-question], or anything resembling a close reason

There may be more, but these are the obvious ones that come to mind.

The tags are generally added by people who have retag privileges but not close privileges and believe that this somehow helps. In this case, the editor has high enough rep to close, so I'm not sure why he/she added the tag. Regardless, it shouldn't be there, so don't hesitate to remove it if you see it again.

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  • I generally wouldn't hesitate to remove a superfluous tag, but thought it wise to discuss on meta first, given how "young" the community here currently is
    – Rob
    Jul 24, 2010 at 23:23
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    Adding to this, if you think the moderators need "help" deciding whether or not to close a question, you should put a comment explaining why, not a useless tag.
    – Brendan Long
    Jul 25, 2010 at 0:30
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Hiya. Just to explain my thought process in adding that tag. I figure there can be an evolving anti-knowledgebase of Not Right For Here questions, which we can point people to ("Take a look at these questions, they're all Not Okay, see what is similar to your question there). If there is a community consensus against doing this, no worries. I just think it could be a useful educational tool.

There is another utility. On sites like this, there is often a "but I am a special snowflake and my question should stand" reaction to closing/deleting off-topic questions. If there is a simple way to point to all similarly-closed questions, people can be shown that it's nothing personal, it's that the type of question is a problem.

Again, if the community is against this, okay. I just think there is a useful thing to be gained by tagging closed questions in that way.

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  • I figured you had a reason for doing it, since the question was already closed. FYI, you can actually search for closed questions by adding closed:1 to your search phrase, so there's no need for a meta-tag. See the advanced search options for more information.
    – Aaronut
    Jul 25, 2010 at 13:21
  • Aye.. but someone new to the site (which is the sort of person who's likely to ask off-topic questions) won't know that.
    – daniel
    Jul 25, 2010 at 18:41
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    @roux, I'd suggest it (the ability to search on closed:1) as something that might be worth adding to the FAQ as that would be a logical place to point users towards that wouldn't 'pollute' the tag namespace with meta-tags =)
    – Rob
    Jul 26, 2010 at 9:17

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