I'm also for merging author-identification into story-identification, but I'd suggest an alternative for handling some of those outlier questions, which is simply to let them stay as story-identification.
authors was suggested, but at the moment it's a fairly useless tag. It's used inconsistently and barely. If it were a good tag, I posit that it would have been much more broadly used.
So, with merging everything into story-identification, I suggest updating the tag guidance from:
Questions asking for help identifying a TV series, comic-book issue/story arc, movie, book, or other story. For help identifying an episode of a TV series, use the [episode-identification] tag instead.
To:
Use for help identifying a story and/or its creator(s), including novels, movies, comic books, entire TV series, etc. Use with another tag to specify which type of media, eg. [short-stories]. For identifying a single episode of a known TV series, use [episode-identification].
Allowing story-id to include creators gets rid of the "need" to have a tag to specify that you're looking for the author. And, it also allows us to include other types of creators, such as those included in "story by:" credits, sources of quotes, etc. without having a bunch of meta tags that are rarely used and barely useful.
In short, a new usage for the tag will:
- Reduce clutter
- Reduce redundancy
- Be more useful
- Reduce the work needed to implement and maintain it