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The tag "references" is about requests for references. Fine. That's a useful tag. But the tags "textbooks" and "books" are synonyms of that tag. That leaves us with no tag I can find for questions about books -- how they get written, how they get published, best practices for writing them, why they do things, and so on.

I'm not sure how to resolve this. Can tags be "unsynonymized"? I can see that that might cause problems, but I am not very knowledgeable about the meta part of this site or stack exchange in general.

Any ideas?

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    $\begingroup$ I assume the software can remove a synonym as a technical matter. However, the description in this question for a proposed “books” tag doesn’t seem to be statistical in nature. $\endgroup$
    – Sycorax Mod
    Commented Feb 18 at 18:58
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    $\begingroup$ I'm not entirely convinced by Sycorax's argument above (I guess we could use the same argument against some existing tags). However, a problem is that it could be too specific and possibly already covered by other tags (e.g. communication ), or by other websites (academia.stackexchange.com or writing.stackexchange.com), depending on the question. $\endgroup$
    – J-J-J
    Commented Feb 19 at 7:13
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    $\begingroup$ Airing the same sentiment as that of @J-J-J, I would be interested to know from Peter, what aspect of writing a book/paper/chapter is being talked about, especially knowing that these are broadly covered in Academia.SE. $\endgroup$
    – User1865345
    Commented Feb 19 at 7:40
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    $\begingroup$ @User1865345 Question such as "why do statistics books do XXX?" and so on. $\endgroup$
    – Peter Flom
    Commented Feb 19 at 10:14
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    $\begingroup$ Thanks @PeterFlom. This provides better insight. So, suppose you are talking about a generic issue common to stats book. Wouldn't it suffice to tag that question based on that topic? In any case, though, I can see potential usage of such "textbook" tag. $\endgroup$
    – User1865345
    Commented Feb 19 at 10:23
  • $\begingroup$ @User1865345 Thanks. I just think there are really two tags here, but all are subsumed under one. $\endgroup$
    – Peter Flom
    Commented Feb 19 at 10:26
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    $\begingroup$ It just crossed my mind, but does upvoting this question count as "I agree that we should have this tag"? I upvoted this question because it is an interesting one, but I don't have a firm opinion about the subject for the moment, one way or the other. $\endgroup$
    – J-J-J
    Commented Feb 19 at 15:53
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    $\begingroup$ Yes @J-J-J: "Like normal Stack Exchange sites, Meta allows members to vote on questions and answers. For most posts, votes reflect the perceived usefulness: well-written, well-reasoned, well-researched posts tend to get more attention and more upvotes. Highly-voted and frequently-linked posts may become part of the community-curated FAQ or codified as part of the site’s Help Center." Source $\endgroup$
    – User1865345
    Commented Feb 19 at 16:59
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    $\begingroup$ "why do statistics books do XXX?" - wouldn't the same question be relevant for statistics MOOCs, or "classic" statistics classes, or papers on statistics pedagogy? And wouldn't the same answers usually be relevant to them, even if they are not about books per se? I picture someone coming along later with a similar question to yours, but about MOOCs, and not finding your earlier thread because they don't search for "books", although that thread would have been useful. $\endgroup$
    – Stephan Kolassa
    Commented Feb 20 at 10:40
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    $\begingroup$ To be honest, I believe the "references" tag is exactly what is needed in this case, and that "books" would be needlessly specific, and dilute the tag. $\endgroup$
    – Stephan Kolassa
    Commented Feb 20 at 10:40
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    $\begingroup$ I know one question that is of the type "why do statistics books do ..." which is Where does the misconception that Y must be normally distributed come from?. For such a case having a special 'textbooks' tag seems a bit redundant. $\endgroup$
    – Sextus Empiricus
    Commented Feb 23 at 20:32
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    $\begingroup$ I can imagine something like an 'explanation' tag. Something similar to self-study but not neccesarily as home-work or exercise. An example question is stats.stackexchange.com/questions/324422/… $\endgroup$
    – Sextus Empiricus
    Commented Feb 23 at 20:35
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    $\begingroup$ Other questions but about Wikipedia instead of books (1) MSE decomposition to Variance and Bias Squared (2) Wikipedia's text about the Clopper-Pearson interval for binomial proportions (3) Why does degrees of freedom = $\frac{\operatorname{Tr}(H'H)^2}{\operatorname{Tr}(H'HH'H)}$? $\endgroup$
    – Sextus Empiricus
    Commented Feb 23 at 20:48

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Any threshold for splitting/merging is somewhat arbitrary, but I personally think the tag already meets our needs sufficiently. Specifics like books/textbooks/papers can be noted in the question title and body.

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