Is [not-arduino] necessary? Is it a meta tag?

Question

Today, the not-arduino tag was added to a bunch of questions. Apparently it is for questions which do not want an Arduino solution.

Is it really necessary? If someone doesn't want to answer arduino questions, they can just ignore the arduino tag (the 'ignore' functionality makes the posts disappear).

Besides, it seems to me like not-arduino is a meta-tag:

The reason meta-tags are a problem is that they do not describe the content of the question. They describe some other aspect of the question, like the author’s skill level, or the author’s motivation for asking it, or generally what “kind” of question it is (poll, how-to, etc.).

Meta-tags are actually a subset of a larger problem that I usually call dependent tags. These are tags that don’t say anything by themselves – you can’t tell what the question is about unless they’re paired with some other tag (or several of them).

It seems like a dependent tag to me. It is also pretty similar to "author's skill level", in the sense that it is filtering out answers based on what the author will and won't accept; whereas other people/visitors may (after all, we write answers for visitors to read, not just to help the OP).

Answer 1

No, it's not necessary and a waste of one of your five tags. Are we going to make not-microcontroller, not-analog, no-capacitor, no-22k-resistor, not-more-than-20cm-wire, ... well, you get my point.

When you don't want an arduino, say it in your question. Most of the time, I don't even look at the tags before answering a question, so it isn't even a useful tag. It's the same as not mentioning the question in the content but only in the title: it's bad.

Answer 2

I don't think it's necessary, because it is a meta tag. Using the points made in the link the OP posted:

If the tag can’t work as the only tag on a question, it’s probably a meta-tag. Every tag you use should be able to work, more or less, as the only tag on a question.

It wouldn't work as an only tag, since it would be describing what the question is not, an infinite possibility of things.

If the tag commonly means different things to different people, it’s probably a meta-tag.

How is the poster to determine if the tag is to be used?

• Every non-arduino question?
• Perhaps they would prefer to not use an arduino
• Perhaps they wish to explicity exclude arduino

Which one is right?

These two tests confirm that not-arduino is in fact a meta tag, and the article mentions that meta-tags are explicitly discouraged.

Additional points:

• The arduino tag (or lack therof) should be adequate enough.If the question does not require the use of an arduino, the poster could just not include the tag.

• The tag sets an example for the creation of other "not-tags".

• The search function should include the ability to specifically exclude tags (if it does not do so already), so that a searcher may exclude the arduino tag from any post results if they are specifically looking for non-arduino posts.