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I recently discovered that we have a tag. Martin Gardner was a man who wrote about puzzles (of many different kinds), not a type of puzzle. What use is this tag? Does it tell people anything about the puzzle? He wrote about , , , , , and many other types of puzzle, so certainly it doesn't narrow down the field very much! Who's going to decide "I want to filter puzzles that are of a type written about by Martin Gardner"? If they know anything about Martin Gardner, they'll probably already know about the kinds of puzzle he wrote about, so they can filter by or whatever.

EDIT: since the Martin Gardner tag tells us nothing about what kind of puzzle is concerned, it wouldn't work as the only tag on a question. That makes it a meta-tag and therefore (correct me if I'm wrong) ripe for burnination.

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  • $\begingroup$ Is it really true that nobody would search for a Martin Gardner puzzle? $\endgroup$
    – user20
    Commented Mar 15, 2015 at 19:17
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    $\begingroup$ @Emrakul But what is a "Martin Gardner puzzle"? He wrote about almost every kind of puzzle there is! That's my point really. If there is a particular kind of puzzle that can be called a "Martin Gardner puzzle", then of course it makes sense (and we should edit the tag wiki). $\endgroup$
    – Rand al'Thor
    Commented Mar 15, 2015 at 20:04
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    $\begingroup$ He wrote quite a number of puzzles, and used many as examples. Perhaps it'd be a good idea to limit the tag to "puzzles written by Martin Gardner," because it's still a useful categorization. $\endgroup$
    – user20
    Commented Mar 15, 2015 at 20:06
  • $\begingroup$ @Emrakul That sounds fair enough. Could you turn that into an answer? This is the issue that motivated this meta post btw. $\endgroup$
    – Rand al'Thor
    Commented Mar 15, 2015 at 20:08
  • $\begingroup$ Lol, that's an interesting change log xD sorry but it really cracked me up, that martin guy really is stubborn $\endgroup$
    – Vincent
    Commented Apr 28, 2015 at 14:01
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    $\begingroup$ "Probably" in that blog post is not "definitely"; it is a heuristic that sometimes (rather frequently, on Puzzling) fails. The real criterion is listed clearly as "does not describe the content of the question." $\endgroup$
    – user20
    Commented May 12, 2015 at 20:52

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At some point the tag has indeed been abolished. Move along, nothing to see here.

(I'm just posting this so that the question doesn't show up as unanswered any more.)

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  • $\begingroup$ ..and rightfully so. Nice cleanup. $\endgroup$
    – BmyGuest
    Commented Sep 9, 2016 at 13:33

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