New tags for "classical mechanics" and molecular mechanics"?

Question

I am wondering the general opinion on creating new tags to address classical methods in chemistry. I feel this would be quite a specific tag genre, but I have gone to search specifically for this several times and I can see plenty of posts that may benefit from this. At the moment I haven't found anything adressing this area of chemistry. Possible suggestions might be;

• classical mechanics (most general)
• classical methods (little vague)
• Molecular mechanics (less general)

Or three separate tags which are all far too specific on their own (in my opinion) but together would work great,

• Lagrangian mechanics (too specific)
• Hamiltonian mechanics (too specific)
• Newtonian mechanics (too specific)

What do you think? :)

Answer 1

I would choose the second option: classical-methods tag. My thought with respect to all three OP's suggestions (taking these guidelines into account) are:

• classical-mechanics tag is not just too general, it's general up to the point when it becomes ambiguous and very likely to be applied wrongly.
• classical-methods tag seems to be way better and I disagree that it's vague: in computational chemistry community it has a well-defined unambiguous meaning.

• molecular-mechanics tag seems indeed a bit too concrete. There are few other classical methods out there, such as, for instance, molecular-dynamics, so, first we need few more tags in addition to molecular-mechanics tag. Secondly, I do especially like the last point in the guidelines I referred above which states that,

  Tags are for categorization of broad topic, not minutiae. If your tag is duplicating the work someone could do with a trivial search or tag + search, it is a bad tag.

  For our particular case, classical-methods is this broad topic guidelines are refereed to; if one is specifically interested in molecular mechanics or molecular dynamics, he/she could just trivially search for it.

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As an additional point I would like to note here that molecular-dynamics tag, an inevitable consequence of having molecular-mechanics tag, is ambiguous: we should at least differentiate between classical MD simulations in which potential energy surface (PES) is obtained from the classical (force field) calculations and ab-initio ones in which PES is obtained from quantum mechanical calculations. So, it is better from the begging to use unambiguous tags, such as, for instance, classical-md and ab-initio-md. But as I said I would take the middle road suggested by OP and introduce just one classical-methods tag for now.

Answer 2

There have been now two instances where proposed tags have been introduced:

1. classical-mechanics by Todd Minehardt (revision) on How to properly relate quantum mechanical energy to the classical world
   There is no tag guidance yet. It seems to me that the tag was created in the sense of "Newton's classical mechanics" though. This is reflecting Wildcat's answer that the tag itself is too ambiguous to represent the computational chemistry branch.
2. Geoff has introduced molecular-mechanics on Molecular mechanics force fields for metals?
   The tag-wiki excerpt reads:

   For questions pertaining to classical force-field methods in computational chemistry, including molecular dynamics simulations using such force fields.

It seems that the latter is the one that was originally suggested, and it may even be the only one that makes sense. Itself being quite narrow, but at least not being ambiguous. As to what degree (I am no expert here) molecular-dynamics is included in the tag in the sense wildcat mentions it, I am not sure. (Please comment.)

I advise, like stated in my comment, against classical-methods as also being too ambiguous.