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Apparently I had a two-year-old question closed and deleted by the mods because "it is not about software engineering, it's about etymology". However, etymology is a valid tag when I posted the question, and there are 27 questions with this tag, one of which received 70+ upvotes.

If the mods think such questions are off-topic, shouldn't they kill the tag and delete all questions with this tag? I don't see how my question is different from any of those.

Also, can't they just migrate the question to another SE, e.g. Linguistics or English Language, instead of deleting a question with 4 upvotes outright?

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  • The presence or absence of tags does not determine topicality. – Robert Harvey May 8 '18 at 18:05
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The existence of other, similar questions, is not a valid reason to keep an off-topic question open. Your question was flagged as being off-topic, and looking at the history, it appears other votes were cast against it that aged away (close votes do expire some time after they are cast). The flag was determined to be correct and handled appropriately.

Your question does not fit the definition of what is on-topic here. Therefore, it was closed. Since it is unlikely to be editable into a form that is on-topic, it was also deleted. If you feel that you can edit it into a good, on-topic question, deletion does not prevent this. You can edit it and then either open a question on Meta or flag it for moderator review to determine if the deletion and closure should be undone.

Now that you have raised an entire tag that is likely to be off-topic, it can be reviewed by the community. I intend to take a pass through it myself. It seems like that tag is a poor fit and wouldn't yield many, if any, on-topic questions. But each question will be compared to the definition of on-topic and handled independently.

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  • good job cleaning this tag. Don't know if you're done but it already looks much better now than it was when this question was posted – gnat Apr 25 '18 at 21:38
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    @gnat Nope - not done. I'd like to get rid of the tag. Although I may just force the synonym with terminology and call it close enough for now. – Thomas Owens♦ Apr 25 '18 at 21:46
  • I see. Will give it a closer look then, maybe I could do something there too (making synonym of terminology sounds like a good plan B for just in case if cleanup gets stuck) – gnat Apr 25 '18 at 21:49

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