Towards defining the tags "electromagnetic-spectrum" and "wavelength"

Question

I have yet another question about tags, this time it is about electromagnetic-spectrum (with 7 questions as of February 18th, 2021) and wavelength (with 23 questions). The tags are different on different level of granularity, i.e. wavelength would most probably imply electromagnetic-spectrum. I write "most probably", because accoustic phenomena have a wave-length as well, but only 6 questions use both wavelength and the search term sound. So what shall we do now?

1. I suggest to introduce a new tag sound in any case and add this tag to the above mentioned 6 questions.

   Questions about accoustic phenomena, e.g. the loudness of an object, or how sound travels in a given object.

2. We could then define wavelength e.g. as

   Questions about periodic disturbances traveling through space and matter. Use sound or electromagnetic-spectrum to narrow down.

3. For electromagnetic-spectrum we could write

   Questions about a certain range of frequencies of electromagnetic radiation, given e.g. as wavelenghts or wavenumbers. Consider using wavelength as well.

Please let me know what you think.

Answer 1

The adage If it ain't broke, don't fix it applies here.

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Sound

Delete it

We have never had and do not need a sound tag. The tag was created yesterday by adding it to two old questions

• Convert pulsar data to sound (2020)
• How loud would the Sun be? (2015)

The questions are five years apart and have nothing in common really. I've removed the sound tag from "How loud would the Sun be?" and added the existing asteroseismology tag which is the correct term for acoustic vibrations associated with star-like objects.

We don't want to encourage questions like "How loud would a supernova be if we could hear it?" or "How loud would the Big Bang have sounded?".

I propose the tag be removed from the one remaining question since data-analysis is sufficient. People can still use good old search at the top of the page or in a search engine to find questions about sound, but we don't need a specific tag.

Wavelength

Leave excerpt blank.

There is no need for usage guidance for this tag. There's no rule that says every tag must have an excerpt, and trying to write one for such a well-established term that means the same thing in all fields of science makes no sense.

Electromagnetic-spectrum

Leave excerpt blank.

Ditto. The tag has had no usage guidance until yesterday. There are a few of its 22 linked questions that probably don't need it but that can be fixed by editing.

There is no need to tell people how to use the electromagnetic-spectrum tag. Trying to come up with an excerpt that covers all possible uses is challenging and may be impossible, and people who choose it already know how to use it.