A homework-question tag to weed out questions

Question

So in TNB I had the idea for a new tag. Homework-question. These questions would be tagged by a higher rep user (or poster). They would be placed in a review queue and discreetly taken care of. You could even add a bot to comment stuff like "Please don't post homework questions" these questions would be removed faster.

Or the tag could just be added so users can edit and tag the questions to allow people to find and decide what to do with those questions.

This obviously does not require to be hard. Just adding the tag would work so users can find the questions about homework a lot faster.

Chat transcript start

Answer 1

No!

1. homework would be a meta tag, i.e., a tag that does not describe the content of the question (the actual post) but something tangentially related (the origin of the problem). Meta tags are frowned upon network-wide because they do not fulfill the purpose of tags.

2. They would be placed in a review queue and discreetly taken care of. You just described flags. Flagging a post (or directly voting to close if you have the the privilege) already places the post in the close votes review queue. Misusing tags to emulate a feature that already exists is absolutely pointless.

3. As DJMcMayhem already said, the existance of the tag suggests that asking homework questions is OK, to which you responded the following.

   The tag wiki could say "if you are using this tag don't post"

   That's completely impractical. Tags get pruned automatically (along with their wikis) if there are no questions that bear it. Since all homework question get closed and deleted after a short period of time, a high rep user would have to re-create the tag every time is disappears. That's a lot of wasted effort for something that doesn't even make sense in the first place.

Answer 2

No

A homework tag would most definitely not weed out off-topic questions. Instead it would look like evidence that homework questions are on-topic.

Clearly my homework question is on-topic. There's even a tag specifically for homework questions!

From the help-center:

A tag is a word or phrase that describes the topic of the question. Tags are a means of connecting experts with questions they will be able to answer by sorting questions into specific, well-defined categories.

Now to be fair, a lot of that doesn't make any sense for a challenge site instead of a Q&A site. But the basic idea is still right. I can go to my profile and see that I tend to ask and answer a lot of string-based challenges, like string, ascii-art, kolmogorov-complexity.

Why on earth would we want to categorize questions that are blatantly off-topic? If we're lucky they'll just be quickly deleted and then any tags become irrelevant.