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I've seen it happen several times, someone will ask how to build a railgun, or how to charge large capacitors to high voltages while demonstrating a level of skill and attention to safety that can only be described as (to be polite) "here, sign this disclaimer, this is your problem now, I'm out of the legal blast range now."

Same story with the guy who puts an isolation transformer on his scope and uses a totally standard probe on non-isolated mains-powered stuff. Sorry, can't find a link at the moment, but it was definitely there a few months ago. Also the guy was a teacher, I remember. Wow.

So, I was kinda baffled by the absence of a "kill yourself" tag, or should it be "suicide"? There is an "electrocution" tag but it seems to only be used in questions from people who actually worry about safety, which is obviously not the same...

Thus, next time someone wants to build a fibrillator (it's the opposite of a defibrillator in case you wonder) what should we tag it with?

I'm torn between "killyourself" and "darwinaward" myself.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ You are proposing a meta-tag. We don't do those here. \$\endgroup\$ – Olin Lathrop Mar 20 '18 at 10:54
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Tags are used to describe the topic of the question (see help center):

A tag is a word or phrase that describes the topic of the question. Tags are a means of connecting experts with questions they will be able to answer by sorting questions into specific, well-defined categories.

What you suggest here seems completely outside their scope. Nobody will sort the questions to answer only "darwin award"-type of questions. This isn't an expertise domain (although I know a few people would could claim such a degree).

The warning could be part of the answer, but should certainly not be added as a tag by the answerer. And I don't think anyone would (but, as per the rules, they should not, anyway) ask a question specifying a "killyourself" or "darwinaward" tag beforehand.

See also this blog entry from Jeff Atwood about meta-tags.

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    \$\begingroup\$ Heh.. someone who is an expert at "killing themself"... probably won't (can't) be here already... \$\endgroup\$ – Andrew T. Mar 20 '18 at 4:23
  • \$\begingroup\$ OK, that makes sense. Thanks! \$\endgroup\$ – bobflux Mar 20 '18 at 11:26

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