# to kill a tag: weighted-sampling

https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/weighted-sampling/info

There is no term "weighted sampling" in survey statistics world. Not at least that I know of. It is like "use Excel to prepare a JASA paper". I guess people meant "unequal probability sampling" when they tag their questions with this dubious phrase, and then it just propagates like "Free Wi-Fi" network in the airports (if you don't know this urban legend: somebody just created an ad-hoc network called "Free Wi-Fi", a bunch of stupid computers connected to non-discriminantly, and so after a little while this network used to be found in every US airport for a few years, even though there was no Internet access or anything; sort of performance-degrading virus).

Anyway, I hate this tag, and would like to kill it. Any comments on this wild desire? My understanding is that I would have to retag all of these questions though. A more generic sampling would be a better fit for most of them (and I believe I worked on that tag earlier).

• Moderators can create a tag synonym and merge weighted-sampling with unequal-probability-sampling (master tag) so that every new suggested tag will appear as unequal-probability-sampling. Is that ok with you? There are several tags about 'sampling' but probably some questions need to be tagged as unequal-probability-sampling and we could keep the most generic one (although it is very broad and sometimes misused, IMHO). – chl Sep 26 '12 at 7:39
• @chl I like your solution here. :) – Aarthi Sep 26 '12 at 16:09
• I guess I just need to boost my own rating and get to the moderator level myself, so that I would not have to bother asking on Meta as to what to do on CV :) – StasK Sep 26 '12 at 21:12

• Relying on tag synonyms should help to solve those problems, IMO: unequal-probability-sampling will be a master tag, but if people think of 'weighted sampling' they will be suggested to look at this tag first. If the wiki description doesn't fit the bill, they can choose another tag or create a new one if they have enough reputation. – chl Sep 29 '12 at 10:32