I present to you the following indisputable (depending on your frame of reference) facts:
- homework is a meta-tag. It describes the status from which the question is being asked, not the content of the question.
- homework might be factually incorrect - for example, it is possible to ask a basic question yet not be a student or otherwise completing an assignment.
- Copied assignments (verbatim) with no attempt at solving the problem are not real questions and should be closed anyway.
- Someone, somewhere, will feel the need to say "is this homework? is it? is it homework? Really?" then somebody else will "USE THE HOMEWORK TAG11!!11" (and I'm mildly fed up of it).
And the following possibly disputable points:
- In spite of this tag, people do not treat the question differently (in my experience).
- homework on occasion attracts some poor quality stuff.
So, I propose we build an army of sentinels, one for every homework-tagged question in the Stack and erase every homework in existence. I do not see this will be a problem; we've become exceedingly efficient at it. In short, I am saying we should finally resolve this question with the answer "NO".
The tag wiki should probably be in the FAQ, where it has greater exposure.
I then propose we make use of the marvelous blacklist feature and block the tag from ever coming back.
For reference reading, see the following meta.crypto post in which I argue for allowing homework questions without using the homework tag and the following meta.programmers question calling for the removal of the homework tag from programmers.
tl;dr The homework tag adds nothing to Stack Overflow and should be removed. We should either remove it slowly via a concerted, consistent community drive of edits so as not to churn too much stuff up on the front page, or use the mod tools to do it (especially with the 17k+ homework-tagged questions existing today). The tag should then be blacklisted forevermore until the end of time.