Tag Wars: cleaning up redundant media tags

Question

TL;DR:

I'm not proposing to burninate all media tags;
I'm just proposing to remove them from questions where they really don't belong.

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Media tags in action

We haven't reached a decision yet about what to do with the media tags. There are two main uses for them:

1. On story-identification to specify what the OP is looking for (example: "I'm looking for a book I read as a kid")
2. To differentiate between works released in different media (ie: "I'm looking for an answer from the Harry Potter movies specifically")

I'm not proposing to touch any of these uses.

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However, I found there is a third and a fourth use that are both unnecessary and often redundant.

Missing work tags

3. Questions about specific works that do not have a this-work tag.

For example, this question about The Road had only one tag: novel. We do have a tag the-road now, but we didn't at the time, so the OP probably thougth "it's a novel, so I'll tag it novel". I edited it to have the proper tag, the-road.

I propose giving all questions like this their proper work and/or author tags.

Department of redundancy department

4. Questions where the media tag is simply redundant, because it's used together with specific tags for the work, author, series, franchise and so on, without falling under use 2 (differentiating between different media for the same work or franchise).

For example, this question about continuity between Snow Crash and The Diamond Age had, again, the tag novel. They're both novels, so that's true, but there are no other media we might be confused with, there are no "novel-experts" that might be of any help, so I removed the tag from the question.

Solution

3. On questions that are tagged with a media tag in absence of a specific tag for that work, tag them with a tag for the specific work, for the series, for the author, or the franchise, preferably using tags already in existence, but creating them if needed.
4. On questions that are tagged with a media tag in conjunction with a specific tag for that work, (or author, series, or franchise), simply remove the media tag but only in those cases where the media tag is redundant (in other words, not falling under use 2).

Cleaning

You can either search for the lot of them in one go:

is:question ( [movie] or [short-stories] or [books] or [comics] or [novel] or [tv] or [video-games] or [anime] ) -[story-identification]

or one at a time:

[books] -[story-identification] (171 questions)
[movie] -[story-identification] (691 questions)
[novel] -[story-identification] (97 questions)
[anime] -[story-identification] (53 questions)

...and so on. Keep in mind that those numbers are the numbers of results returned by those searches, but, as not all those need to have their tags cleaned, those are not the numbers of edits to be made.

Of course, these will contain many false positives, since it's just a search for media tags not used in conjunction with story-identification.

But I plan to go through these, add work tags and author tags where needed, and remove media tags where unnecessary or even redundant.

Who's with me?

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Also see the general tag clean-up effort called Tag Wars.

Answer 1

After discussing the cleanup with those involved, looking at the results of our current tag usage, and looking at our previous discussions on tagging:

I'm currently against this.

I think before we start doing any sort of large scale retagging effort, we first must come up with a cohesive, consolidated tagging policy and philosophy.

Otherwise, we're looking at either continued confusion and misuse of tags or recurring/multiple major clean-up events.

I don't think this clean-up or the others are bad ideas, but I think that the forward-planning for tags is more important than the immediate cleanup.

Once we have a full game plan, we can do a single, massive retagging that makes all the changes at once. Many questions that may be subject to multiple retagging efforts can just be done a single time (I have reasons to suspect there could be many). Synonyms can be made, or tags renamed by mods, which will also eliminate some work. The least disruptive approach to this is waterfall, not iterative.

Answer 2

I'm against this for a couple of reasons

1 - I fail to see how this would improve the site or its usability in any dramatic fashion. Yes, I can appreciate that it's annoying to have the tag novel on the question you've highlighted but at the same time, I don't see how it actively harms the site either.

2 - Without any idea of the sort of scale of what you're proposing, this could potentially swamp the front page with hundreds, potentially thousands of largely meaningless edits

The pain seems to outweigh the benefit, especially since it's an open invitation for the 'tagging crew' to screw up the front page for an unknown period, potentially running into days or weeks.