# Should we do something about [mixed-design] tag?

I noticed that we have ×63 tag that did not have any wiki excerpt. Many of the questions are about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-design_analysis_of_variance, i.e. ANOVA analysis with between-subject and within-subject factors. But a noticeable fraction of the questions is about mixed models, or about something else entirely. And indeed the term "mixed design" refers to experimental design and so in a way is very broad, encompassing large fraction of the mixed model questions. I don't think this is a productive tag.

My suggestion is to go through all [mixed-design] Qs, remove the ones that are not about mixed ANOVA, then rename the tag into [mixed-anova], and then make it a synonym of . The idea is that in the end we have and , and Qs about mixed ANOVA should go into [anova].

Alternatively, we could have as a separate tag, but currently there are hundreds Qs about mixed ANOVA not tagged as such, so I'd say it's too late.

An additional complication is that we also have a ×53 tag which is basically the same thing, but is more of a niche terminology. My inclination would be to leave it as is. Current wiki excerpt:

An experimental design used in situations where one factor can be changed more easily than another one. It's also called "mixed design" because it involves between-subject (hard to change) and within-subject (aka repeated measures; easy to change) factors.

PS. This is a continuation of Let us merge [mixed], [mixed-effect] and [mixed-model] tags.

• It seems the tag was created in July 2014 for this question about mixed ANOVA. Jan 18 '18 at 12:22
• It's a tricky situation, but your proposal seems at least as reasonable as anything else I could think of. The biggest catch I can think of is that, while in practice mixed-design seems to mostly be used to talk about mixed ANOVA, in theory I think the tag might more appropriately be a synonym for split-plot. But I guess there's no sense in creating a synonym that would be contrary to how most users actually end up applying mixed-design to their questions. Jan 20 '18 at 16:05
• @Jake that's right, that's partly why I suggest to eliminate [mixed-design] as a tag name; if we rename it into [mixed-anova] and make it a synonym of [anova], anybody wanting to ask about mixed anova will correctly get redirected to [anova]. I doubt that with this arrangement, [mixed-design] will ever reappear. Jan 21 '18 at 22:13

I have eliminated .

Questions about mixed ANOVA I was retagging as newly created ; as a result this tag now has ~40 threads.

As I wrote in the question, given that already has hundreds of questions about mixed ANOVA (any ANOVA analysis involving some within-subject and some between-subject effects) , I suggest we make [mixed-anova] a synonym of [anova] now.

I have suggested this synonym so upvote if you agree: https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/anova/synonyms.

• I think this is a nice solution. Removing mixed-design, which can mean a lot of things not necessarily related to anova, makes a lot of sense. And I also agree that mixed-anova can just link to anova. Thanks. Jan 30 '18 at 15:38
• I [believe I] approved the synonym for this & merged them. [Something is strange, though, & I can't tell if it worked properly. Hopefully, it's done & the issue is permanently resolved.] Feb 22 '18 at 1:30
• @gung Looks merged to me. Thanks! Answer marked as accepted. Feb 22 '18 at 7:08
• @gung Hmm, I wonder if whatever "was strange" could have caused this: stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5186. Mar 9 '18 at 16:08
• Yeah, could be. At this point, I don't quite remember what the issue was, though. Maybe the m-a 'ghost' is a one-off, & not something that will typically occur. If so, just fixing the m-a ghost via a hack should be doable. Mar 9 '18 at 16:11
• @gung Hmm, I tried to delete or edit stats.stackexchange.com/posts/324506/edit, but I am getting "An error occured submitting the edit" error message no matter what edit I am trying to do (either deleting the whole excerpt or replacing it with something). Could you try to delete it as a mod? Mar 13 '18 at 13:38
• I can't tell that it worked for me, either. I can just delete [m-a] altogether. Do you want me to do that? (I could also try to recreate it later as a synonym.) Mar 13 '18 at 13:43
• @gung I just noticed that I don't see the ghost excerpt on the Tags page anymore (even though if I open stats.stackexchange.com/posts/324506/edit, then I still see it, but now it does not seem to be displayed anywhere). I am wondering if you did anything else since then or if the problem just dissolved somehow. Mar 26 '18 at 8:08
• I don't quite remember, @amoeba. I thought I deleted the tag altogether. I'm pretty sure I remember doing that. But it's clearly still there. I think the link to the edit page is just flotsam in the servers for the site that no one has ever thought to clean up (& may not be worth the devs' time). My guess is that at this point the situation has resolved itself satisfactorily one way or another. Mar 26 '18 at 13:40