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This tag has been burninated. Please do not recreate it. If you need advice on which tag to use, see the answer below. If you see this tag reappearing, it may need to be blacklisted.

There is a tag, which is rather vaguely described as follows:

A logical fallacy in which the developer begins with what he is trying to end up with, like class A extends B, class B extends A.

Questions are on everything to drawing circles on GUIs to implementing circular queues to circular references and dependencies.

Given how ambiguous this is, can this tag be sent to the file?

To explicitly address the burnination criteria:

Does it describe the contents of the questions to which it is applied? and is it unambiguous?
Not even close - even its tag Wiki is really vague as to what the tag is for.

Is the concept described even on-topic for the site?
This could refer to a number of topics, but the tag admittedly doesn't appear to be drawing a lot of off-topic questions. So, the answer to this is "maybe, depends on what topic you're referring to." Many of the topics (e.g. questions about circular references or dependencies) are on topic, but this could just as easily refer to off-topic questions. Even the tag Wiki's description is only dubiously on-topic.

Does the tag add any meaningful information to the post?
Not really - given how ambiguous this is, if I were to filter on the tag, I'd have no idea what kind of questions I was going to get.

Does it mean the same thing in all common contexts?
No, I listed a few examples of multiple contradictory meanings that this tag could have above.

21
  • 46
    Wow, that’s a terrible description.
    – Ry- Mod
    Commented May 13, 2018 at 3:01
  • 8
    This tag seems like a job for Trogdor.
    – reirab
    Commented May 13, 2018 at 4:31
  • 2
    @Ry- Yeah, it's pretty bad. There's absolutely zero consistency in what kind of question are tagged with this either.
    – EJoshuaS - Stand with Ukraine
    Commented May 13, 2018 at 5:02
  • Perhaps that definition could be more compatible with a [circularity] tag rather than [circular]?
    – GeekInDisguise
    Commented May 13, 2018 at 7:56
  • 13
    I'm pretty sure that's not what a logical fallacy is.
    – John Montgomery
    Commented May 13, 2018 at 20:47
  • 1
    Note: the process for burnination is described here; notably, there are 4 questions you should answer.
    – Matthieu M.
    Commented May 14, 2018 at 9:21
  • 7
    Looks like a reasonable chunk could be retagged as [circular-dependency]
    – Michael
    Commented May 14, 2018 at 9:34
  • 5
    @Luuklag No one reads tag descriptions.
    – EJoshuaS - Stand with Ukraine
    Commented May 14, 2018 at 11:10
  • 4
    @ErikvonAsmuth ambiguity is the harm, surely? If a term is ambiguous and used to describe multiple unrelated scenarios, then it cannot be used for any sort of navigation or analytical purposes, other than in order to disambiguate it, so it wastes the time of users who would utilise unambiguous equivalents, such as the [circular-dependency] tag mentioned previously, as well as time wasted in managing inappropriate usage.
    – Muckee
    Commented May 14, 2018 at 13:26
  • 7
    What is the key to tagging success? Burninate the correct tags! How do you know you burninated the correct tags? You know because you have tagging success. So the key to tagging success is (circular) reasoning? Yes, because (circular) reasoning is the key.
    – rgettman
    Commented May 14, 2018 at 17:25
  • 2
    Stats at the time of featuring: Q: +64/-4, No answers
    – Bhargav Rao
    Commented Dec 18, 2018 at 1:08
  • 3
    @KyleDelaney American too (at least I've heard it in the U.S. before).
    – EJoshuaS - Stand with Ukraine
    Commented Dec 18, 2018 at 18:43
  • 1
    @KyleDelaney No, it's mostly American
    – Caleb
    Commented Dec 19, 2018 at 14:05
  • 1
    @KyleDelaney I hear it a lot in the recruiting industry referring to bad resumes
    – EJoshuaS - Stand with Ukraine
    Commented Dec 19, 2018 at 14:16
  • 2
    Stats at the end of featuring Q:+112/-5, A1 (saying Yes/retag): +48/0, A2 (saying Yes): +2/-1. The community is in favor of removing the tag. (Even though the top voted answer mentions a retag, it informs at the end that all of the posts need to be retagged, which implies that we need to burn the tag).
    – Bhargav Rao
    Commented Dec 20, 2018 at 5:14

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
49

That's approximately 400 questions. A random sample says this is mostly a retag effort. Retags go fast because people can't run out of edits.

for build dependency problems

is a particular data structure--a circular linked list

for more exotic structures

for ring buffer questions (ring-buffer becomes circular-buffer) including circular queue and circular array

and for drawing circles

There's also quite a few questions referencing a circular scroll control which I have to admit I've never heard of. E.G. Circular Scroll View

Out with this ridiculously ambiguous tag; retag the lot

5
  • circular scroll view is called a carousel view nowadays link for anyone interested->camo.githubusercontent.com/…
    – Karan Harsh Wardhan
    Commented Dec 18, 2018 at 13:02
  • Mortarboard! Not that it matters on meta.
    – Joshua
    Commented Dec 18, 2018 at 15:37
  • 7
    "people can't run out of edits" don't give them any ideas...
    – TylerH
    Commented Dec 18, 2018 at 16:08
  • 1
    What about the famous circular-freehand-line aka freehand-circle? ;)
    – iLuvLogix
    Commented Dec 19, 2018 at 11:24
  • 2
    I like how both the question and the answer are by a Joshua
    – Kyle Delaney
    Commented Dec 19, 2018 at 21:31
5

has been burninated.

trogdor

Thanks to everyone who participated.

Observations/Retag Guidance:

Use the following tags instead of , in case the question is on-topic:

Progress:

The tag is in the process of being burninated. You can help out by reviewing the questions with this tag, and...

  • editing questions (to improve the question and remove the tag) (retags only edits are best left to users with full edit privileges),
  • flagging/closing questions that are duplicates/off-topic/unclear/too broad/opinion-based,
  • filtering on this tag in the Close Vote Queue,
  • voting on questions with this tag,
  • voting to delete the questions with this tag (after they have been closed, and only if the entire Q&A contains nothing of value). However, keep in mind that at the end of the burnination process all closed questions containing this tag will be deleted automatically. Thus, there's rarely a need to vote to delete these questions.

Here are some quick links to get you started:

Track the progress of burnination

Remember that burnination is a clean-up effort!

Salvage whatever possible by editing and re-tagging.

We don't want to destroy value, so salvaging a post should be your first priority. If a question can be saved, please edit it. Your edit should improve all problems with the question and remove the tag, possibly replacing it with another tag, as described above in "Observations/Retag Guidance". (Edits, specially re-tags, are best left to users with full edit privileges)

Unsalvageable questions should just be flagged/closed. They don't need to be retagged.

If the question is not appropriate for this site, then don't worry about removing the tag—just flag/close the question it is attached to.

At the end of the burnination process, all questions that still remain with the tag should have been closed. These will be mass-deleted, which will remove the tag from the system automatically, with minimal disruption.

Ask for help if you need it.

If you have any questions about specific questions you come across, or the process in general, please feel free to leave a comment on this post. You can also drop into the SOCVR chat room for real-time advice and discussion.

2

I cannot think of a single programming question that would be improved by adding this tag. Logical fallacies aren't exactly on-topic in a coding question, although they may be in answers.

As already noted, the vast variety of (mis-)uses it has been put to have also made it essentially worthless. It appears that it has been applied anywhere that involves round shapes: round UI elements, circle drawing, radial graphs, drawing text in circles. Occasionally it gets used in place of the the more specific , , and .

After browsing through a few pages of questions I didn't find a single one that appeared to match the definition. It appears that none of them would suffer if we simply removed the tag.

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