The homework tag is now officially deprecated

Question

Homework is no longer a tag on Stack Overflow.

Keeping this post for historical reference. --Shog9

The result of a rather lengthy discussion concludes with the homework tag needing to go away on Stack Overflow. As far as tag burninations go, this is quite large, with over 20,000 questions to examine. When the tag is removed, it will be blacklisted - banished to the outer realms and never spoken of again.

The need for preemptive cleanup

Before we put the torch to the thatch, it's worth taking a minute to review these questions manually. One of the reasons why the homework tag is now being discouraged is that it was so often used pejoratively - a way for someone to say, "this question looks useless or lazily-written" rather than offering advice or... Cleaning it up. While the majority of the questions are decent enough, that still leaves hundreds that should've just been closed, and many more that could use some editing.

How can I help?

Jeff suggests the following strategy:

1. View the tag ordered by votes, then go to the bottom (lowest voted). Deal with the "worst" 100-200 of these first.

   https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/homework?page=1222&sort=votes

   ^{If your page size is set to something sane, you'll want to click the last page number at the bottom there.}

2. View the closed questions in this tag, order by whatever you like (votes?) and deal with the worst.

   https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=%5Bhomework%5D+closed%3A1

Try to remove the worst of the worst, then we can remove the tag from the rest en masse.

So... I just need to edit out the tag on these then?

NO!

The vast majority of these questions will be re-tagged without anyone looking at them directly. We're looking specifically for questions that need some attention but will get lost in the noise when the tag is removed.

After you've given it the attention that it needs (whether that's editing, closing, or flagging), then remove the tag - but remember, you're re-tagging purely as a signal to others that this question is done. Only remove the tag once that question is as close to perfect as you can get it.

What should I look for?

• Is this even a real question?

  If you can't make sense out of the question, or it's simply a dump of an assignment with no context or additional detail, or an indecipherable mess vote to close it or flag it as "Not a Real Question".

• Does this only make sense if you know it's homework?

  In some cases, an assignment is so contrived that it sounds completely insane unless you know that it is homework. If possible, edit these to clarify the purpose and intent, so that they can stand alone - but if that fails, vote to close as Not a Real Question.

• Was the tag inappropriately applied?

  There are some very basic but still perfectly decent, on-topic questions that may have been closed once someone other than the OP made an edit to apply the homework tag. If a closed question is basic, but on-topic and well-asked and was not closed as a duplicate, vote to re-open it.

Why do you hate students?!

We're not discouraging students from asking questions on Stack Overflow! However, the consensus is that everyone can benefit from answers that explain why not just how, and everyone should be encouraged to ask questions that are clear and complete (and list all requirements up-front, even if they're the nonsensical products of an out-of-touch professor or manager).

By getting rid of the "homework ghetto", we hope to make it clear that asking good questions and writing good, informative answers is something everyone should strive for. And if you feel the same way, we're all grateful for your assistance!

Answer 1

Here's an idea, why don't we ask SE to tweak the new review queue and route all the homework questions through there (note, I'm not asking for a tool that let's moderators do this, that opens the door to abuse, but rather, I want them to manually tweak the algorithm/flags/whatever to run that set of questions through the queue)? We'll certainly get the closures quicker and ensure coverage of all those questions.

Once the queue is cleared again (which should be quick, because we'll have all of the people who use that queue, not just people who are always on meta and willing to do something about it), the tag can be nuked from orbit, knowing that all the questions with the tag had been properly vetted.

The blacklist could then be applied.

Easy-peasy. Let's do it.

Answer 2

If only we could find a way to embed one of these into the final product of everyone who posts on the homework tag.

Answer 3

With a big tag that needs cleanup, I do two things to triage, and I'd suggest the same with homework

1. View the tag ordered by votes, then go to the bottom (lowest voted). Deal with the "worst" 100-200 of these first.

   https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/homework?page=1222&sort=votes

2. View the closed questions in this tag, order by whatever you like (votes?) and deal with the worst.

   https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=%5Bhomework%5D+closed%3A1

The best thing to do is deal with the bottom of the barrel first, try to remove the worst of the worst, then burninate the rest as at least not-harmful.

Answer 4

YES!

I don't see how this review-and-remove can work if the tag isn't blacklisted. It's going to be added again and again to new questions. If the tag was blacklisted, editing a question tagged homework, for any reason, would require removing the tag. I think that's ok. There are plenty of “homeworky” (and non-homeworky) questions in need of closing that don't have the homework tag anyway.

I don't think there's anything to be gained by not burninating the tag right away. Part of the reason the tag is useless is that it does not categorize questions in any meaningful way. The probability that a homework-tagged question needs reviewing is higher than average but not dramatically so.

Answer 5

I've been working on the homework question cleanup. To help, I created a SEDE query that lists all the tags associated with questions tagged homework, sorted by question count.

What I do is:

1. Pick a small-ish tag of a dozen or so questions, such as masm.
2. Search for [homework] [masm] to show all those questions.
3. For each of those questions:
4. Flag any This should have the homework tag!!1! comments as obsolete.
5. If the question is perfectly fine without homework, remove the tag. (I try to add a more specific tag in its place, depending on the question topic).
6. If the question is not a real question (eg. verbatim homework dump) or too localized (eg. "you forgot a closing brace"), vote to close the question as necessary and leave the homework tag in place.

The above ensures that others who are searching for homework questions will also see those that still need attention.

In just a couple of days, we have nailed nearly 5% of the homework questions. This is doable, but it will take a while.

Answer 6

There's a lot of good commentary, but one point that was raised doesn't sit right with me.

Will this question help anyone else but the person who asked it?

This is predicting the future. While there is "low hanging fruit" on the question tree that applies to nearly everyone, there is also room for questions that seem to apply to only a single person. I don't want StackOverflow to be only a "greatest hits" question repository, as we often see that popularity doesn't breed an ideal world (for whatever measure you are seeking).

Also it implies that you can predict a question's future utility, or that you can measure that utility based on StackOverflow's captured metrics (which are not gathered in the blind and are subject to gaming).

It also shifts StackOverflow from a resource where one can part-time mentor a new software developer into a resource for seasoned professionals. Yes, we have tons of entry points for fresh meat, but those new recruits to the field need to be acclimated to StackOverflow's way of doing things after they attempt to use StackOverflow. It would be nice if it worked the other way around, but the complaints about "what you are supposed to do" are proof that there is an acclimation period that trials first SO use.

I don't think that this criteria is well thought out, and it seems to be a weak point. Kill the homework tag if you wish, but don't confound utility of the question and answers with popular utility of the question and answers.

Answer 7

Could people please stop asking for mass deletion of the homework tag?

I want it gone just as much as anyone else but.... even a quick look will show you that there are a lot of these questions that are inappropriately tagged, even once homework is removed. That means these questions need some tender McLovin'. There are a whole bunch of questions just labelled c homework (and some that also contain a third random-ish tag), so just blowing away the homework tag will leave these questions balancing precariously on the edge of the tag universe.

We should also be flagging the Is this homework? or You need to tag this as homework comments as part of the clean up. These comments are redundant now that the tag has entered burnination.

Answer 8

A quick search shows that there are 1,809 homework questions which are already closed. That's almost a tenth of the 20,000 total homework questions. Can we possibly get a mass-untagging of any closed homework questions?

Answer 9

With this answer, I am suggesting a feature-request (a kind of).

We would have such situations in future that would require a clean up for tags. Can we some-what automate this? I suggest create a tag (may be 'cleaned-up' or '.' (dot)) as a master tag, and then, if you could make 'all such tags to be cleaned up' as synonyms to this master tag.

And then, make some rule at back-end to just not display such tags any more, or do any other appropriate thing like close the post/put into moderator review queue, or ??

This would save much of the effort and time. I mean - all the active users would do this respectfully try to action them at their end as much as they can, but 17,000 + questions is a huge number. And as this process has started, we see a lot of old questions dumping in the front.