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@quid: I only said what was written on the election page. -- Being a candidate myself, I feel it is not up to me to comment on the way the election is organized.
Well -- the time of the start of the election has been announced in the top right corner of the election page since the beginning of the nomination phase. Also, in the grey box on the right there was all the time the sentence "However, if there are 10 candidates or less, we skip directly to the election phase.".
@MarkMeckes: I think the time frame for the election here is quite o.k.. Apart from this, I think the pace in academia is often slow where it would better be faster, and pretty fast where it would better be a bit slower -- if you understand what I mean.
@FrançoisG.Dorais: The user in question has number 40619, and has therefore joined just two days ago -- so how can he already have "a background of misbehavior"? -- Maybe with different accounts?
@BenjaminSteinberg: Of course displaying just the numbers would be pretty bad. -- But every MSC number has a text attached to it, and that (or some shorthand in case it is long) might be displayed as a tag.
@FrançoisG.Dorais: Sure, there are 4 or 5 times as many 5-digit MSC numbers than tags in MO -- but contrary to MO tags, the MSC is an hierarchical scheme. Thus if e.g. using two of the three levels is sufficient for MO, one could well restrict to that.
@FrançoisG.Dorais: I think the main point are not single inappropriate tags. Contrary to the top-level arxiv categories, the MSC is already fully-thought reasonably complete standard classification, and I think adopting it for MO would probably remove the need to think about adding or removing tags, about which tags are appropriate and which are not and about which tag means what. Or do you see a reason for MO's partial reinvention of the wheel here?
Only a small part of the tags are actually arxiv tags. -- The arxiv classification doesn't go very much into detail, which is -- besides the easiness of creating new tags -- probably the reason for the many additional tags, including tags with unclear meaning and outright 'clutter tags' (though some of the latter have been removed in the course of the thread meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/642/…).
By the way, is there a particular reason why MO uses its own classification of subjects in mathematics rather than a tag system along the lines of the MSC (ams.org/mathscinet/msc/msc2010.html)?
