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In TeXample, there is an interesting "Scientific and technical areas" part that really helps to find more efficiently kind of canonical graphs in these fields.

On TeX.SE unfortunately, such "field of expertise" tags are not used whereas it would certainly help (?)

Screenshot, tags shown on the right side:

screenshot

Is this something we should add to posts?

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  • Can you give some examples of how this should be implemented? Or are you suggesting just adding a tag like astronomy to questions that deal with Astronomy, say? Then you'd probably have plenty of mathematics tags, which makes that type of tag superfluous. No? – Werner May 4 at 17:08
  • We do have some tags like that, the linguistics tag comes to mind, but that's because it has some very specific packages. – Alan Munn May 4 at 17:34
  • Mathematics and physics will obviously have an over representation, but I was more thinking of sub-fields: logic, algebra, differential analysis, probability, statistics etc But it'd probably lead to too many tags.... For instance, if I type "brownian" I get 63 answers. - There are 3 questions I asked and I could have tagged "finance,economics". - Probably 2 questions, from epidemiologists who would have tagged medicine or epidemiology,etc Anyhow, I candidly thought it would help reusing the knowledge on this fantastic site on another dimension. – JeT May 4 at 17:47
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This may add value to the search functionality so should be considered, since we rarely use up all five available tags for a question. More relevant tags associated with a post means there will be more ways to filter them during searches. Perhaps the "field of study" can be replaced by "topic" instead...?

Here are some things to look out for:

  • Some packages may have the same name as a "field of interest." In particular, there already exists a physics package. So one would have to discern between (say) and (and perform the appropriate steps to change a tag).

  • When creating a new tag, immediately complete the associated tag wiki so people are informed about their usage. If you're uncertain about this, post something to TeX.Meta asking for direction on the description and excerpt. In other words, don't just create a new tag (because you have the privilege) and leave the details blank.

  • Be considerate when retagging older posts so as to not flood the home page with too many post modifications.

  • Don't tag for the sake of tagging. Some posts may fall in none, or most of the topics you've created. So, they don't all have to have some/at least one topic. Only if it clearly makes sense or is evident from the post.

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  • Thanks to have look into this. Agreed with you, no tagging for tagging, drawing 3 nodes next to each other is not related to a field: ) As another obvious example, when I type on google site:tex.stackexchange.com <synapse> and check images, many answers would have deserved to be tagged "epidemiology" or "medicine" while the title was not related, it would have been more tricky for an epidemiologist to see the graph in the answer. – JeT May 5 at 22:59
  • It would also provide an eye from an expert in that field to question/validate the veracity of the answer graphically produced. – JeT May 5 at 23:05

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