I'm a mathematical physics student, and recently I edited a lot questions with , and .

According to Wikipedia and my knowledge, mathematical physics is a branch of math and use advanced mathematical methods to deal with physical problems, mathematical methods like functional analysis (especially operator algebra, spectral theory), algebraic topology, algebraic geometry, Riemannian geometry and geometrical analysis, complex geometry and Kahler manifolds etc.

As far as I'm concerned, only calculation and derivation with physical background but without using mathematical methods, should be tagged instead of , and questions about physical field should not be tagged which is a branch of abstract algebra in MSE.

However, I do feel confused (and a little disappointed) when the following edits were rejected:

  1. I thought these questions shouldn't tagged with since they're just calculation: (1) (2) (3)

  2. I thought these questions are really relevant to or or (4) (5) (6) (7)

My question:

Are there any explanation for these rejected edits? And are there any suggestions to avoid this?

Update 1:

Some rejection update when I tried to edit some high-vote question with to decrease misunderstanding.


Although some of my edits were rejected by some users repeatedly, I don't mean to accuse or blame anyone, just want to make some contribution to this community by making question with tagged correctly, and know how to improve myself.

Thanks for your kindly discussion.

Update 2:


These edits above were all rejected by Saad in less than 1 minute, which makes me doubt if my (and other users') edits were treated seriously, or just simply rejected for convenience. And I don't think that's a polite and friendly manner to do so.

Undate 3


and should be suggested synonyms, but has few users and questions. This was discussed here and here. So I decided to manually change [tqft] to [topological-quantum-field-theory]. However, these edits were all rejected by Saad again.

  • 1
    $\begingroup$ I believe I've reviewed some of your edit suggestions recently, approving some and rejecting others. As a self-identified "mathematical physics student" it is natural that you would have a more acute sense of the distinction between "mathematical-physics" and "physics" as tags. However I'm not convinced that the advanced vs. simple calculation axis is a good way of drawing a line between them (if indeed any dichotomous treatment is needed). $\endgroup$ – hardmath Mar 4 at 18:43

I've reviewed quite a few of your edits over the last few days, and for a little while I thought you were just trying to increase your rep $2$ points at a time. I did eventually notice that you were engaged in retagging, but what made it hard to spot initially is:

  1. you tend to make small (and often unnecessary) changes to the body of the post, like italicising or emboldening words and phrases. That distracted me from the retagging.
  2. you are retagging some quite old questions (I think in your list of examples in the question you have one from $2011$ and one from $2013$), which made me doubt the value of the retagging, and hence your sincerity.

As I say, I did eventually realise what you're doing, and since it does seem to improve the searchability of the questions and answers I've been approving the edits when they're otherwise good. It's possible that other reviewers haven't noticed the retagging, or simply disagree that it's improving search on those questions.

  • 1
    $\begingroup$ Thank you for your kindly explaination:)) Some relatively new tags like [conformal-field-theory] and [tqft] are not widely used as they should be, so I tend to add these tags also for draw attention. $\endgroup$ – Andrews Mar 4 at 13:26

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