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Today I asked a question tagged . I was not sure if it is on topic, but the history tag says:

Use this tag for questions about the history of a programming concept or feature.

I agree that my question is most likely not on topic for Stack Overflow, and it maybe would have been better to post this on Programmer SE. However, does the tag make sense on Stack Overflow anyway? For me it seems that "questions about the history of a programming concept or feature" are off topic.

I know that there are a lot of good and on-topic questions tagged with , but they seem not to fall into this "questions about history..." category.

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    I agree. At worst, most of those questions are off-topic. At best, history is a meta tag and should be removed anyway.
    – Bill the Lizard
    Apr 30, 2013 at 12:57
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    Related/dupe: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/134391/…
    – ben is uǝq backwards
    Apr 30, 2013 at 12:57
  • Looks like it's mostly being used for "browser history", "commit history" and similar uses.
    – hammar
    Apr 30, 2013 at 12:58
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    Did you learn something new from that question? Was finding out that hidden fields are useful to store state in a stateless protocol a new discovery to you that you may well use in the future? Hopefully you did, the primary goal of SO is to learn. That knowing the history of html evolution would have helped you know this is not untypical.
    – Uphill Luge
    Apr 30, 2013 at 13:01
  • @UphillLuge yes of course I learned something, now I know what its original purpose was. What do you want to tell me with this comment?
    – Uooo
    Apr 30, 2013 at 14:46
  • @hammar: yes, but it's not supposed to be, by the tag's own description. I think that either the tag meaning needs to be revised or we need to untag those questions.
    – Kyle Strand
    May 3, 2013 at 2:09
  • If we removed the [history] tag, where would a good place for history-of-computers-and-software type questions? CS?
    – Kyle Strand
    May 3, 2013 at 2:10
  • Also, here's an example of a highly-voted but closed history question: stackoverflow.com/questions/1515324/…
    – Kyle Strand
    May 3, 2013 at 2:13
  • The history tag-wiki itself also mentions several tags that are more specific (and hence more appropriate) for the types of questions to which history is currently being applied: stackoverflow.com/tags/history/info
    – Kyle Strand
    May 3, 2013 at 2:16

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