

There is a tag, which is rather vaguely described as follows:

A logical fallacy in which the developer begins with what he is trying to end up with, like class A extends B, class B extends A.

Questions are on everything to drawing circles on GUIs to implementing circular queues to circular references and dependencies.

Given how ambiguous this is, can this tag be sent to the file?

To explicitly address the burnination criteria:

Not even close - even its tag Wiki is really vague as to what the tag is for.

Is the concept described even on-topic for the site?
This could refer to a number of topics, but the tag admittedly doesn't appear to be drawing a lot of off-topic questions. So, the answer to this is "maybe, depends on what topic you're referring to." Many of the topics (e.g. questions about circular references or dependencies) are on topic, but this could just as easily refer to off-topic questions. Even the tag Wiki's description is only dubiously on-topic.

Does the tag add any meaningful information to the post?
Not really - given how ambiguous this is, if I were to filter on the tag, I'd have no idea what kind of questions I was going to get.

Does it mean the same thing in all common contexts?
No, I listed a few examples of multiple contradictory meanings that this tag could have above.


That's approximately 400 questions. A random sample says this is mostly a retag effort. Retags go fast because people can't run out of edits.

for build dependency problems

is a particular data structure--a circular linked list

for more exotic structures

for ring buffer questions (ring-buffer becomes circular-buffer) including circular queue and circular array

and for drawing circles

There's also quite a few questions referencing a circular scroll control which I have to admit I've never heard of. E.G. Circular Scroll View

Out with this ridiculously ambiguous tag; retag the lot

  • circular scroll view is called a carousel view nowadays link for anyone interested->camo.githubusercontent.com/… – kkarakk Dec 18 '18 at 13:02
  • Mortarboard! Not that it matters on meta. – Joshua Dec 18 '18 at 15:37
  • 7
    "people can't run out of edits" don't give them any ideas... – TylerH Dec 18 '18 at 16:08
  • 1
    What about the famous circular-freehand-line aka freehand-circle? ;) – iLuvLogix Dec 19 '18 at 11:24
  • 1
    I like how both the question and the answer are by a Joshua – Kyle Delaney Dec 19 '18 at 21:31

has been burninated.


Thanks to everyone who participated.

Observations/Retag Guidance:

Use the following tags instead of , in case the question is on-topic:



  • editing questions (to improve the question and remove the tag) (retags only edits are best left to users with full edit privileges),
  • filtering on this tag in the Close Vote Queue,
  • voting on questions with this tag,

Here are some quick links to get you started:

Track the progress of burnination

Remember that burnination is a clean-up effort!

Salvage whatever possible by editing and re-tagging.





Ask for help if you need it.



I cannot think of a single programming question that would be improved by adding this tag. Logical fallacies aren't exactly on-topic in a coding question, although they may be in answers.

As already noted, the vast variety of (mis-)uses it has been put to have also made it essentially worthless. It appears that it has been applied anywhere that involves round shapes: round UI elements, circle drawing, radial graphs, drawing text in circles. Occasionally it gets used in place of the the more specific , , and .

After browsing through a few pages of questions I didn't find a single one that appeared to match the definition. It appears that none of them would suffer if we simply removed the tag.

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