# Tag-related problems with migrations from MathOverflow

Recently there were some discussions on MathOverflow and Mathematics and Meta Stack Overflow related to an automatic check on tags that is performed when a question is migrated:

It is checked if at least one of the tags on the questions exist on the target site (possibly only as tag-synonym or intrinsic tag), if not the migration is automatically rejected. This can cause some unwarranted rejections, since one needs an exact match and already an extremely minor variation such as singular/plural can cause a rejection.

Especially related to MO there is the issue that on MO the main tag for statistics is named st.statistics, and not just statistics; due to MO using the math categories of arXiv as top-level tags, which are marked by a prefix.

Now, on this site (unsurprisingly) no tag st.statistics exists and while (I strongly assume) statistics would be an intrinsic tag here and a question thus tagged accepted, this is not the case for st.statistics and questions got rejected due to this.

The reason I raise this here, while not being active here but only on MO, is that if this should be resolved in a somewhat direct way it essentially can only be fixed here. I do realize that an initial reaction might be, why not just rename st.statistics to statistics on MO, but this would change the entire tagging system there, and synonyms on the source site do not help, very unfortunately IMO, to change this was the content of my meta.SO post mentioned above.

Two ideas I could offer to resolve this in a somewhat quick way (if this site even wants to receive questions from MO tagged only st.statistics):

1. Ask for st.statistics to become an intrinsic tag.

2. Make st.statistics a synonym of something fitting here, e.g., mathematical-statistics, on the grounds that if it comes from MO it should be mathematical-statistics (though in reality this might not always be true yet it might be better to have some resolvable mistags than rejections through-out).

Sorry for bursting into your meta with some suggestion/request, but I thought the issue might be of interest here. One could also envision to work on more compatibility of the tagging systems, but the migration traffic is not that high so maybe it is not worth the effort to work on details.

Of course there could also be issues in the converse direction, this site to MO, where the problem then is easier to fix on MO (as then synonyms there could suffice). If there should be such problems and you let me know, I could communicate and try to resolve them there. (I have no official role on that site, but can say to be pretty involved with tagging there.)

• What's an "intrinsic tag"? Jan 23 '14 at 22:53
• #2 is the natural solution, provided we don't have to (manually) create loads of synonyms. If st.statistics is the key synonym to make, that can be done within a minute. Are there other MO tags we should be looking at, too?
– whuber Mod
Jan 23 '14 at 23:04
• @Scortchi this is a "tag" not actually used as a real tag on the site (typically since it is too broad/unspecific for the given site) but that is accepted as a tag when a question is migrated to it (it is stripped and the question might get untagged). Like, tex.SE has no tag 'tex' but a queestion being tagged 'tex' should still be migrateable there, so it is intrinsic there. For 'official' info see Shog9's answer on the linke meta.SO question.
– quid
Jan 23 '14 at 23:06
• @whuber In addition to the st.statistics the other big one could be that on MO it is pr.probability (instead of probability). If you could have these two as synonyms then I think this should suffice, and one could try to make it known on MO that people voting to migrate to here pay attention to this, and add one of the two if nothing matching is present. It seems unlikely to me we have question to migrate where neither st.statistics nor pr.probability would work. At the moment the problem really is that the most common tags do not work due to the unusual naming MO has.
– quid
Jan 23 '14 at 23:20
• I have a problem: in response to trying to create the synonym, the system tells me "The tag st.statistics is banned." We will need to escalate this to the SE team. I added a few tags to your question to try to get their attention :-).
– whuber Mod
Jan 23 '14 at 23:23
• @whuber Thanks for the rapid response and the info. Perhaps too close to only 'statistics' to trigger something or st.statistics was already dealt with explicitly, which would however be surprising as very recently it still was rejected. Let us wait what official info will come.
– quid
Jan 23 '14 at 23:42
• @whuber the statistics tag is blacklisted as an intrinsic tag, since everything on Cross Validated would fit into the tag.
– m0sa StaffMod
Jan 24 '14 at 10:47
• @m0sa please note that whuber meant to create st.statistics (not statistics) as a synonym of an existing tag (mathematical-statistics). The motivation is that st.statistics is the name of the statistics-tag on MO and presently questions being tagged (only) with this tag cannot be migrated here (from MO). If st.statistics were intrinsic (like statistics) the problem would also be resolved (in a different way), see suggestion 1 in OP. But st.statistics seems to be neither creatable nor intrinsic.
– quid
Jan 24 '14 at 11:16
• @quid, I'm sure he tired to create a synonym from st.statistics to statistics. If any of those 2 tags were blacklisted (statistics is intrinsic in this case, so that's true) he'd get the error message that the source tag is blacklisted (which is a bug - fixing), but that's what I think happened
– m0sa StaffMod
Jan 24 '14 at 11:42
• @m0sa Your surmise is correct. In fact I expected to encounter a problem in making anything a synonym of statistics and was surprised that the error message pointed instead to st.statistics. My reply to this thread details the work-around I found thanks to your comments. I appreciate your help.
– whuber Mod
Jan 24 '14 at 16:08