##Make books and novel synonyms.
###1. There's no separated media tags for movies/films that differentiate them from other works.
###2. A minimum of 71.5% of books questions are tagged incorrectly, but I suspect it's really at least 80%. Correctly tagging them all is a waste of effort, because:
###3. Users are going to continue using books the way novel is intended, because that's what makes sense for the word. Four years worth of cumulative evidence has shown us that.
books is supposed to be for specific the book version of a work that's also a movie.
Use this tag only to differentiate the book from the movie or other media.
I think this is a bit of a silly usage, to say it's only for that purpose. movie and film are synonyms. Neither one of them say they're only for differentiating the movie from the book version. However, movie is often used that way. Outside of story-identification, the main usage of movie is actually to differentiate between the written other versions of the work.
Of course, the most glaring issue with books is that users don't actually use books by the definition anyway:
books with 635 questions
Top 9 tags, by question count, used with books
- story-identification x454, 71.5%
- aliens x37, 5.8%
- novel x34, 5.4%
- young-adult x32, 5.0%
- tolkien x26, 4.1%
- lord-of-the-rings x24, 3.8%
- magic x18, 2.8%
- time-travel x16, 2.5%
- suggested-order x15, 2.4%
Compare to:
novel with 528 questions
Top 9 tags, by question count, used with novel
- story-identification x430, 81.4%
- books x34, 6.4%
- young-adult x31, 5.9%
- aliens x29, 5.5%
- time-travel x18, 3.4%
- magic x13, 2.5%
- post-apocalyptic x13, 2.5%
- spaceship x11, 2.1%
- short-stories x10, 1.9%
As you can see here, the primary usage of books is story-identification, which is not only the "wrong" usage, but the the same primary usage as novels. In fact, separately, their number of questions tagged as such is very close to the same, but [tags:books] is actually higher. When two words have a near 50/50 split of when they're chosen for the same purpose, that's an excellent sign of a synonym.
After the top single used with it, we see some overlap. aliens, time-travel and young-adult. Something to note is that those three tags are primarily used for story-identification, so they're likely used in questions with 3+ tags, than just books or novel alone.
Even without the books wiki definition, it's easy to see that novel shouldn't be on books list and vice-versa. That's redundant, no matter what.
Currently the top-voted policy is:
Novel is always a book, but a book is not always a novel. So I say go with the more inclusive term.
Yet, I can see when that makes a reasonable difference to how we tag questions. The times when a book is is not a novel is usually when it's a short story or some other media which we already have another tag for.
Going back to my executive summary, there's very strong reasons for making the two tags synonyms, but no strong reasons for keeping them separate. The strongest argument for keeping them separate has been completely ignored by the majority of the community. The other reasons, such as my last quote, seem like arguments to create additional tags, for things that aren't novels but are books.
