General tagging practices [duplicate]

Question

What are our general tagging practices?

A few current practices are:

Questions about a specific tv show, universe or well-known work: dune, battlestar-galactica
Questions about a specific author, or an author's lesser-known work: use the author's full name, e.g. isaac-asimov
Story identification questions: story-identification
Questions covering a specific subgenre: alternate-history, hard-scifi, …
Questions covering a specific theme: aliens, weapon, …
Questions about a specific medium or format: movies, novels, … These are deprecated

What other practices are recommended?

About medium tags: for tags that you deem deprecated, they're still heavily used, though inconsistently. Is that a case where people are misusing the tags or am I understanding it wrong? — Borror0, Commented Feb 27, 2011 at 16:58
@Borror0: I call them deprecated because most of the people who replied to your question were against them. They're still there because no one has removed them. I'm willing to mass-delete them (mods have a tool for that), but I'd rather see the response here first. — user56, Commented Feb 27, 2011 at 17:03
@gilles the two answers with the most votes are "it depends" and "some might sometimes be useful". That doesn't seem against? — Tony Meyer, Commented Feb 27, 2011 at 19:29
@Tony: against having them systematically. You're right that this doesn't justify removing the tags altogether. — user56, Commented Feb 27, 2011 at 19:35
Perhaps meta.scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/421/… could be merged with this question? — Tony Meyer, Commented Mar 3, 2011 at 10:02
@Tony: I lean towards keeping these questions separate: what tags to use here, how to choose the names there. — user56, Commented Mar 3, 2011 at 22:29

Community · Accepted Answer · 2017-03-16 15:46:23Z

Here are some guidelines for choosing tags for a question about a specific work:

For books and short stories, use the author's name as a tag (e.g. isaac-asimov). For media franchises, use the franchise name as a tag, e.g. star-trek.
- Do not use more precise tags such as titles of specific books or specific seasons of TV series, except for extremely popular works such as lord-of-the-rings.
If at all applicable, strive to use tags for plot or setting elements, e.g. aliens, good-against-evil.
Consider using subgenre tags if applicable, e.g. hard-sci-fi, urban-fantasy.
Do not use media tags such as movie or short-stories just to indicate that a particular work is in a particular format. Use these tags only when the medium is intrinsically relevant to your question, e.g. movie to indicate a movie adaptation of a book.

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