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The tag system on MathOverflow is designed in such way that each question should contain top-level tag; these are the tags which correspond to subject areas on arXiv and generally have format such as or . (The first two letters are the shortcut used on arXiv and they are followed by the name of the area.)

For more details see: What are top level tags, and why should I try to use them? and Why are MO tags formatted as they are?. Quote from the latter: "As a rule, each question should have at least one of these top-level tags." Also quite recently François G. Dorais mentioned such tags: "For example, the systematic use of broad area tags borrowed from the arxiv on day one brought a lot of stability to the general tagging system here."

So as far as I can tell, the rule that at least one top-level tag should be used in each question - or at least in most of the questions - is still in place. (And it seems to be a useful rule for several reasons.)

However, it seems to me that some tags which do not have arXiv format are used basically as top-level tags. For example, it seems that , , are used in this way. (Maybe also ?)

TL;DR: My question is which are the tags that do not have "arXiv format" but still can be considered top-level tags. (In the sense that they cover quite broad area and that the question which have one of these tags but no arXiv tag can be considered as tagged in accordance with recommendations in the FAQ.)

Or, if the questions from the areas mentioned above should also additionally have "arXiv " tag, which tag should be used in these cases.

EDIT: I have looked a bit through the tag-wikis and saw that the tag-info for co.combinatorics (revision history) explicitly mentions graph theory. Similarly, the tag-info for lo.logic (revision history) explicitly mentions set theory. In these two cases the two "arxiv" tags are definitely close to graph/set theory and these tags are often used simultaneously. (Out of 2829 questions tagged , 1108 are also tagged lo.logic. Out of 2957 questions tagged , 1149 are also tagged co.combinatorics.)

Linear algebra is explicitly mentioned in the tag-info for ra.rings-and-algebras (revision history). But in this case is much less clear whether this would be a suitable top-level-tag for a typical linear algebra question. (Indeed, out of 3160 questions tagged , only 133 are also tagged ra.rings-and-algebra.)

For the tags mentioned above, there are 1327 questions tagged graph-theory with no top-level tag, 1273 questions tagged set-theory with no top-level tag and 1690 questions tagged linear-algebra with no top-level tag.

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    $\begingroup$ I would prefer all graph-theory questions to also be tagged co.combinatorics, as it makes it easier to see the questions of interest to me in one place. $\endgroup$
    – Ben Barber
    Commented Oct 24, 2017 at 12:58
  • $\begingroup$ I think that there are a number of questions for which graph-theory is a natural tag, but co.combinatorics is not so natural, or at least not primary. Notably some for which gr.group-theory is the utmost natural top-level tag (an example is mathoverflow.net/questions/281285 where by the way gr.group-theory is currently missing). $\endgroup$
    – YCor
    Commented Oct 28, 2017 at 12:26
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    $\begingroup$ What about soft questions, like mathoverflow.net/q/281447 ? $\endgroup$
    – Jules Lamers
    Commented Oct 30, 2017 at 16:58
  • $\begingroup$ @JulesLamers If we have question which does not belong to a specific area of mathematics, (gm.general-mathematics) could be used if we want to enforce top-level tag rule. This tag was mentioned in chat here and here when discussing how a particular question should be tagged. (It would probably be better to hear from more experienced users than me what they think about this.). $\endgroup$
    – Martin Sleziak
    Commented Oct 30, 2017 at 17:06
  • $\begingroup$ @MartinSleziak What would be the best way to hear from others: turn it into a separate question, or wait until we get more comments here? $\endgroup$
    – Jules Lamers
    Commented Oct 30, 2017 at 17:28
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    $\begingroup$ @JulesLamers Todd Trimble promised in chat that he will talk a bit about this with François G. Dorais. So I hope we will see here an answer from one of these two users eventually. (It was not exactly this issue, but related to top-level tags - so I suppose that if they plan to discuss this, they'll touch also on this.) $\endgroup$
    – Martin Sleziak
    Commented Oct 30, 2017 at 18:01

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