This question is prompted by a recent question with the tag algebra-precalculus, although I see that it's by no means the first.

This tag apparently means something to some people. I believe that specifically it means something to people who went through the US education system (whether in the US or in an American school elsewhere). But to me, as a product of the British education system, I look at the six questions which have the tag and four of them involve concepts or notation which I first encountered after differential and integral calculus, one of them appears to be really geometry and tagged algebra because it's an X-Y problem, and the less said about the final one the better.

I think we need to do one of three things with this tag:

1. We delete it as unhelpful.
2. Someone who knows what it means writes a detailed tag wiki for the benefit of those from other educational systems.
3. We rename it to something which can be understood internationally.

I've placed those in what I consider to be ascending order of preference. Suggestions for point 3 are welcomed. Following Wikipedia, I would propose elementary-algebra.

posted about 2 years ago

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Peter Taylor‭

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