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The small 'liberal arts' tag is defined in the tag wiki as:

Questions having to do with liberal arts subjects such as literature, languages, art, music, philosophy, and history.

However, several of the questions seem to be about liberal arts colleges:

Whereas others are about liberal arts:

Should this be separated into two tags or otherwise cleaned up?

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    Is there even any group of disciplines that call themselves liberal arts and have inherent commonalities in their academic culture? Wikipedia directly redirects liberal arts to liberal-arts education.
    – Wrzlprmft Mod
    Oct 8, 2019 at 20:48
  • I do not know. Maybe the tag could be renamed into liberal-arts-colleges , if that is a coherent concept, and removed from the then irrelevant questions.
    – Tommi
    Oct 9, 2019 at 6:10
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    liberal-arts-colleges might be a coherent concept in one specific country, but outside there Wikipedia suggests that it's an extremely recent import. Perhaps us-style-liberal-arts-colleges would be a more accurate name.
    – Peter Taylor
    Oct 17, 2019 at 14:51
  • @PeterTaylor There are also tags nih and nsf, as well as irb, and probably other regional tags without explicit mention of a country or such.
    – Tommi
    Oct 17, 2019 at 18:32

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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  • Eliminate the tag as too vague
  • Create a new tag for "Liberal Arts Colleges"

The current tag description is wrong. "Liberal arts" does not mean arts and humanities. The traditional meaning is grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. Other sciences are not in the traditional list because they did not exist at the time the list was made.

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    I agree. In particular, the three questions over there that are not about liberal arts colleges all could have a more specific tag, and both those tags already exist.
    – Tommi
    Oct 17, 2019 at 10:58
  • I edited the tag away from the three linked questions about specific liberal arts. Maybe more activity later.
    – Tommi
    Oct 21, 2019 at 14:25
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I would tend to say let's leave them be. Yes, there are two distinct meaning here, but :

  1. the meanings are closely related (at least in the US system), and
  2. the number of questions is small enough that it's probably not causing any real difficulties to have them lumped together.
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    Yeah, the US caveat is needed - I had little idea what "liberal arts" meant until I moved here ;-)
    – Flyto
    Oct 16, 2019 at 17:34
  • Since there are only a few questions, it is easy and painless to fix the matter.
    – Tommi
    Oct 17, 2019 at 10:59

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