# Synonyms for the "Test" tags

Stats.SE seems to have a few ambiguous / synonymous tags:

The former two are even missing a description. I'll leave merging and creating appropriate tag wikis to you, but I thought I would mention it.

• Hi @slhck! I am looking through the old tag-synonyms posts to see if something still remains to be done. Both [test] and [testing] are currently (and for quite some time already) synonyms of [hypothesis-testing], so consider accepting gung's answer to make this thread appear resolved. Dec 15 '15 at 14:41
• @amoeba Done, thanks for letting me know. Dec 15 '15 at 20:11

You need 2500 rep to suggest a tag synonym. However, I fully agree with you. I vote that both and should become synonyms for . As test & testing don't have tag wiki excerpts to help determine their proper scope, and as they are less utilized, they should become synonyms in this case, in my opinion.

In general, I think maintaining the optimal organization and usability of the site will require some amount of continuous effort. Much of the organization is driven by the tags, so they need to be created, merged, and (at a minimum) have tag wiki excerpts to guide their usage. Unfortunately, I also don't think the synonym suggestion system works very well on CV, because we are a smaller and younger site. There are relatively few users with the needed rep and number of upvotes on a given tag to suggest synonyms and to vote on the suggestions of others. Frankly, I doubt that anyone regularly checks the synonyms page to see whether any are pending and to vote on them. Certainly, I'm guilty of that.

• The suggestion to create synonyms is a good one, but slow down! The first step is to look at the questions that have been tagged with "test" and "testing." This reveals "test" is often used in a much less formal way than a hypothesis test and "testing" is sometimes used in a completely different way (as in clinical testing). Creating synonyms will lose those distinctions and, in a few cases, make the tags confusing or irrelevant. Fixing all this requires first retagging the 72 or so questions, perhaps creating some new tags, and only then creating the synonyms.
– whuber Mod
Aug 7 '12 at 14:26
• Let me tell you from experience that the synonym suggestion system doesn't even work well on sites in the scale of Super User. It's always better to just post a question on Meta, let users decide and moderators create the synonyms appropriately. Aug 7 '12 at 14:27
• @whuber, I'm perfectly happy to be wrong here (your comment is exactly why I posted this answer, rather than just going & making the suggestions myself). But if they are being used in a meaningful, but distinct, way, we should create tag wiki excerpts to clarify that. Aug 7 '12 at 14:31

According to my conception hypothesis-testing means Test of Statistical Hypothesis. A test of a statistical hypothesis $H$ is a rule or procedure deciding whether to reject $H$ or accept $H$ based on a given sample from the population.

In statistics I think test or testing means hypothesis-testing.So, there is no need of these two tags whenever there present the hypothesis-testing tag.