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In the interests of providing options: We should get rid of the joke tag entirely. Most of the questions with this tag are either already closed, or not very funny (obviously subjective). I don't think the tag really serves a useful purpose, and it should probably just get burninated.

In practice the two have very different flavours. As rand al'thor says, reverse-puzzling questions tend to be deliberately short of useful information, whereas puzzle-identification ones tell you everything the author knows. Reverse-puzzling questions tend to have plenty of "abstract" information -- state graphs, tables of possibilities, ... -- but lack "...

I disagree. Firstly, there are many branches of maths which don't currently have their own tags: analysis, calculus, algebra, trigonometry, topology, and so on. You could make a case for creating tags for all of these, but that would be a lot of tags to create that currently have no puzzles assigned to them. You also say "puzzling isn't meant for Algebra", ...

I agree that this puzzle type warrants it own tag. I could easily imagine wanting to search for this kind of puzzle of particular. I think that the tag should be limited to puzzle to devise a strategy for the players to guess their hat colors, and not include puzzles like this one or this one, where you are asked to make a logical inference from player's ...

Tags are allowed to have subtags. Just like we're allowed to have both the general mathematics tag and specific tags like geometry, number-theory, combinatorics, and so on, it's also fine to have both the general poetry tag and specific tags like limerick, haiku, and so on. Is the limerick subtag causing any trouble for the site? Being misused on questions, ...

Turns out that poem is a proposed synonym for poetry. The poem tag itself was removed from the system some months ago on account of going unused. This is a fairly routine situation, but what we neglected to do was exclude synonyms that haven't been approved yet from the autocomplete lookup. The fix is out in production now. Thanks for the report!

I agree with your proposal: using an adjectival tag will hopefully make it clearer that it's only meant to be used for posting puzzles which have an element of humour, not for simply posting jokes. Another problem with the simple joke questions of the 'bad' type you mention is that they tend to invite unexplained answers. With a proper riddle, a good answer ...

Looks like all of these have been dealt with by now, except : network and graph-theory (where graph-theory is the better choice) Indeed, network (11 puzzles and its description even mentions graph theory) should become a synonym for graph-theory (58 puzzles).

I think the three tags cryptic-crosswords, cryptic-clues, and crosswords refer to distinct things and each is useful. I think it's reasonable that a user might want to do an actual complete cryptic crossword puzzle, and use that tag to search for any that have been submitted. At the same time, a puzzle like this would be an odd result for a user expecting ...

series and sequence are not synonyms. (Whether we actually need the series tag is another matter, since the only question that uses it correctly was closed as off-topic.) The series tag is used for the mathematical definition of a series: the sum of the terms of a sequence. The first question to use the tag does not fit under the sequence tags (sequence or ...

I don't think this would count as a complete answer, but here's my shot. Does a tag like this already exist? No, I don't think so. You mention blackboard: nonetheless, all the questions tagged like this are also tagged mathematics. If I understood correctly, you're looking for puzzles which are also not mathematical. If not, would our site ...

I think the two are distinct. One refers to puzzles using cryptic-crossword-style clues, (some puzzles use several of them, and may have other elements as well), while the other refers to actual cryptic crosswords, where there is a grid of words to fill in. If they are being used incorrectly, it is up to the community to edit the tags. I just removed ...

There are puzzles like Logic behind numeric sequence, which are abstract mental exercises where the poster claims not to know the answer.  ISTM that it might be appropriate to tag these with unsolved-something (but definitely not real). Then again, they both smell of meta.  What sort of person would be an expert in real-world puzzles or unsolved mysteries?

I've gone ahead and manually approved the synonymization, so status-completed.

"Mechanical puzzles" refers to most physical puzzles, twisty or not - Sliding tiles (15-puzzle), ball mazes, take apart, put together, etc. The wiki for it just needs to be broadened appropriately.

I suppose that the only difference is that the real tag can be a mystery which is solved, whereas unsolved-mysteries is specifically unsolved, Personally I don't think they should be merged, but they are similar

After doing a little looking at some of the questions tagged humor, I'd suggest what @GentlePurpleRain did in the comments to this question: Get rid of both humour and joke! Take a look at the list of humor-tagged questions. There are only 4 with a QScore of > 10. The first two are logic problems that have a joke-type setup "...walks into a bar.&...

All of the following is in my humble opinion. I think that game is a proper subset of gametheory and strategy, and neither of the last contain the other. Since tags should only be made synonyms when they are about the same problems, none should be made synonyms. A puzzle tagged game should be asking for the outcome of a particular game under optimal play. ...

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If you look at the actual tag wiki for word-problem (after clicking the tag, click on "learn more..."), it states: A word problem is a problem that's stated in words, usually in terms of a story or a situation that dresses the problem up. Although generally all problems will use words, a word problem relies on the words to make the problem ...

I say the two tags are not the same (although their descriptions may be quite misleading). A word-problem in my eyes is a puzzle where the story element is crucial, and the puzzle cannot be solved without it. Phrasing, dialect, choice of words, etc. are all important when solving these types of puzzles. On the other hand, story puzzles don't have to focus on ...

First of all, I don't think they should be synonyms. We can leave the blackboard tag as it is, because there are a few such questions and more might turn up in the future. Yes, it is a subset of reachability but how is that a problem? There are reachability questions that do not involve a blackboard also. And number-theory is a subset of math and both are ...

It looks like this was done way back in 2014 by Joe Z. status-completed. Case closed, Sherlock.