The page on hyper-parameters on wikipedia seems to answer this question pretty well. Do you find something confusing about the explanation there?

I actually know what it is already. I also know that there is a Wikipedia article on this, and many others elsewhere (including Stack questions). My logic was:

• The wikipedia article is somewhat long and technical, but an answer here would be a few paragraphs and more accessible
• I had the impression that even if the question is answered elsewhere, it's still okay to ask it here

To be clear, I've also asked this question: https://meta.codidact.com/posts/289951 If you're thinking that questions answered on Wikipedia should be off topic for the ML proposal, let me know and I can delete this one.

I would argue that the second sentence on the linked page gives a clear answer to the question. If you think it is too technical, then it would be good to include this information in your question. The problem is that my answer would end up being very similar to the information in this second sentence.

Maybe we can try to include some sort of minimum effort clause in the proposal to make this clear.

Probably, if that's a concern. Wouldn't the same issue apply to https://proposals.codidact.com/posts/289949 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_learning#Approaches ?

I would argue that the linked question focuses on what paradigm to use in what context. Furthermore, the question (vaguely) acknowledges the existence of other "learning" terms, but you are definitely right that the list of approaches is a nice addition and I updated the question accordingly.