I was looking at some questions relating to methods of organic oxidation and reduction and I wasn't sure whether to use the redox tag. The tag wiki doesn't specify where it should be used but I have a feeling that it isn't quite the right tag. Maybe organic reduction/organic oxidation
or perhaps oxidising agent/reducing agent
would be useful tags to have or should we just use redox.
1 Answer
As an organic chemist, I am perfectly comfortable with describing a reaction involving the oxidation of a compound as a redox reaction. In fact, I teach these reactions using the familiar terms of general chemistry. More importantly, tags like organic reduction
are unnecessary because we have two tags that appropriate cover this subcategory: redox and organic-chemistry. The new tags would not help users find other redox questions or other organic chemistry questions. There are 24 questions using both tags (currently) and probably more organic chemistry questions that could be tagged with redox
also.
I do not think there would be many cases where a proposed tag like oxidizing agent
would not also qualify for the redox
tag. Oxidizing agents are only oxidizing agents when they react in redox reactions. They may have other behavior in other reactions.
$\ce{HCl}$ is an oxidizing agent in this reaction:
$$\ce{2HCl + Mg -> MgCl2 + H2}$$
$\ce{HCl}$ is not an oxidizing agent in this reaction:
$$\ce{HCl + NaOH -> NaCl + H2O}$$
organic reduction
and it gets 100 questions. Outta that 100, 20 are gonna be mistags, as not everyone knows what the tag is supposed to be conveying, and 70 will have bothredox
andorganic reduction
. So someone would pay a visit to meta.chem.SE and writes in big capitalized letters: "ORGANIC REDUCTION TAG RESIDUAL - LET'S BURN IT DOWN" So I say this might bring more troubles than not. $\endgroup$oxidation
orreduction
and applied reaction-mechanism if the question was about the how. Sometimes theredox
tag will still work, as it is still technically a reduction-oxidation reaction. Admittedly this is not ideal, but the tags should not summarise a question, but merely categorise them. I believe the proposed tags would not make finding questions any easier. $\endgroup$