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Comments on Tags about quantities: should we have them?

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Tags about quantities: should we have them?

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I've noticed there are a lot of tags referring to general physical quantities (e.g. current, voltage, frequency)

I'm not sure if they are useful. For example, what usage would have the tag voltage? If a question is about a particular voltage, e.g. breakdown voltage for a diode or threshold voltage for a comparator, then one would probably use a more specific tag.

But "voltage" alone? OK, one could ask a question about the meaning of voltage or the like, but otherwise it seems a tag prone to become a kitchen sink.

For example, at the time of this writing, there are 46 questions tagged voltage and they cover a bewildering range of subjects, for example:

  • Cables voltage ratings.
  • Testing on induction motor.
  • Analog computer operations.
  • Transformer phasor graphs.
  • Arc welding.
  • Various examples of circuit analysis.
  • Tunnel diode modeling.
  • Semiconductor devices equations.
  • etc.

Is it useful a tag that can be applied to such a wide variety of questions? What usefulness would people get to click on that tag and browse all the tagged questions?

And if we decided to get rid of it (and similar general tags), what would we use for questions that are actually on voltage itself as a concept?

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Using voltage as a way of saying "I'm dealing with voltage here" is pointless - most electronics questions do.

I think the voltage vs current tags are however relevant in the case when you need to be more specific about which one of the two that applies.

For example if you have a digital signal and a question about EMC, it becomes highly relevant to provide information about whether the signal is voltage modulated or current modulated (aka a current loop).

Similarly questions about voltage drop over cables might apply, in which case current consumption is highly relevant and you need to mention both. Or questions about common industry standards 0-10V vs 4-20mA. And so on.

It might make sense to switch some of the voltage tags to supply-voltage in case they are dealing with power electronics.

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I agree with your rationale behind differentiating between voltage and current (that's important in m... (2 comments)
I agree with your rationale behind differentiating between voltage and current (that's important in m...
Lorenzo Donati‭ wrote over 1 year ago

I agree with your rationale behind differentiating between voltage and current (that's important in many different context). I think in most places you can do that using more specific tags. E.g. current-loop, ground-loop, ground-bounce, 4-20mA-loop.

I'm trying to understand whether we could completely eliminate the plain voltage and current tags (and similarly overly general ones) because they are like a kitchen sink.

The problem I see is that then we would need specific tags for when people have specific questions about currents and voltage as concept (and there is no other tag applicable).

I'm thinking if it would make sense to create tags like `voltage-concept'.

Lundin‭ wrote over 1 year ago

Lorenzo Donati‭ Yeah it does also make sense to have the tags for very fundamental physics questions. "What is voltage?" or whatever (which may be more suitable for https://physics.codidact.com/ anyway). I think the key here is not to remove the tags, but to have active tag moderation and replace tags with something more appropriate where applicable.