Let's figure out our Tolkien tags

Question

Currently, we have a bunch of tolkien tags:

• tolkien
• middle-earth
• lord-of-the-rings
• the-hobbit
• silmarillion
• fellowship-of-the-ring
• the-two-towers
• return-of-the-king

(as mentioned by @JasonBaker:)

• an-unexpected-journey
• desolation-of-smaug
• battle-of-five-armies

(These^ are for the movies, I think.)

Do we need all of those tags?

I can see keeping lord-of-the-rings and the-hobbit separate. And even silmarillion (though I would prefer it being renamed to the-silmarillion).

But to we need the individual work tags? Questions may be from one book, but answers will often be from the entire canon.

As for middle-earth... We need to either clarify usage or burninate it. As it is, it's being used on some tolkien questions, because middle-earth is almost a synonym of tolkien. Notice that I said almost. The difference is, that middle-earth can be used to refer to the place, not just the works that are set there (as I think that the usage should be).

Thoughts?

Answer 1

Wearied as I am by tag tomfoolery, I suppose I do have a warg in this fight.

That being said, most of your complaints aren't actually directed at Tolkien tags; there are secretly two or three different holy wars lurking beneath the surface.

• Obviously, there's little reason to get rid of lord-of-the-rings, the-hobbit, and silmarillion. Insofar as separate tags for the Tolkien Legendarium are necessary, those three unquestionably are

• I don't see any point in renaming to the-silmarillion, other than pedantry. I'm also not going to throw a tantrum if it does happen, but I'll point out that this isn't the only tag that should be renamed as such, if that's important to the community - it's not even the only tag in this discussion.

• The tolkien tag is an interesting one because it's a rare case that one of the other tags wouldn't apply. I can perhaps imagine a situation where a question was asked about Tolkien himself (Did Tolkien have experience with addiction? would be one such example).

  Of course, we have an astonishing precedent for "author" tags on this site; off the top of my head, we also have cs-lewis, brandon-sanderson, george-lucas, jk-rowling, giger (for some frigging reason), gene-roddenberry, rod-duncan. And I've no doubt there are more besides. This is Holy War Number One.

  There are really only two things a tag like this would be good for:

  1. The tag being for questions about Tolkien himself. This is essentially alexwlchan's response to a similar discussion.

  2. A general tag for the Legendarium as a whole. The more I think about this, the more I think about how incredibly useful such a tag would be; it's quite rare that a question is ever truly restricted to a single book, and there seems to be a natural tendency towards creating this sort of tag; it's basically what tolkien has turned into over the years, and many people try to use lord-of-the-rings for the same purpose. It's also, essentially, what star-wars, harry-potter, star-trek are, among many others.

     If we were being pedantic, something like tolkien-legendarium would be the best option for this purpose; since Tolkien did write things not set in his imagined world, it seems unfair to lump them all under his name.

  Realistically, though, there's little hope in changing course now; without developer intervention (I don't think mod intervention is sufficient), which seems unlikely given the complexity of the undertaking, modifying all 900+ tolkien questions, and/or introducing a new tag for all 1000+ Legendarium questions, is going to take a prohibitively long time to do; we're trying to stop a train with a BB gun. My philosophical inclination (and I admit my bias) is just to leave the past in the past, and try to do better going forward

• The purpose of the "works" tags (fellowship-of-the-ring, the-two-towers, return-of-the-king) is to be used for the films, not the books. This isn't something that is always done consistently, but it fits with the many, many other tags we have for individual films.

  That being said, I actually agree with you: there's little point in having them at all, and you can throw an-unexpected-journey, desolation-of-smaug, battle-of-five-armies, star-trek-first-contact, return-of-the-jedi, and all the rest in with them. On several occasions I've started drafting a meta post on this very topic, before ultimately falling victim to the "couldn't be arsed" virus.

  This is (or shortly will be) Holy War Number Two.

• middle-earth. Fun fact: the usage of this tag has already been clarified, way back in 2011:

  FAQ

  Q. Isn't everything in Tolkien's Legendarium part of Middle-earth?

  A. No: Middle-earth is one small section of the world Tolkien created, Arda. Other regions include Beleriand, north of Middle-earth and the original home of the Elves; Númenor, the land of the Dúnedain; Aman, the undying lands of the Valar and the elves; and the Dark Lands, south of Middle-earth.

  Q. When should I tag something Middle-earth?

  A. Use middle-earth when you want to ask a question about something general to Middle-earth: a location, a race, or a historical event. You can use it in conjunction with other, more specific tags like lord-of-the-rings or the-hobbit. Do not use it when you want to refer to other parts of Arda, like most of the events of The Silmarillion.

  That being said, this tag is fantastically frequently misused. Just looking at the ten most recent questions in the tag, I'd say that nine of them don't need it; Was Beleriand Bigger than Second/Third Age Middle-earth? is the lone exception.

  Obviously that's not to say that it should never be used, but it needs to be policed far more effectively than it currently has been.

And guess what! There are so many more "Tolkien" tags that you haven't even considered:

• shadow-of-mordor should be left

• sauron, gandalf, saruman, aragorn, bilbo, morgoth, feanor, galadriel, melian, hurin, smaug, tom-bombadil, earendil, luthien, gollum. I'm sure there are more, but this is starting to depress me.

  All of these fall under the general umbrella of "character tags", which have a contentious history on this site. Personally, I think they should all be cast into the Void with the Great Enemy, where they belong. Some of these I just executed.

  This is Holy War Number Three

  • Subcategory: arkenstone. I want to kill it, but it's marginally useful.
  • Another subcategory: smeagol was rrecently (ish) aliased with gollum. This is probably for the best, although I contend that they're different characters. But then I hate character tags, so I'm not going to complain about reducing their numbers

• valar, istari, maiar, nazgul, hobbits, ents, edain are more forgivable than character tags, because they encompass relatively-broad subcategories of the Legendarium, and yet have narrowly-defined scopes

• numenor, undying-lands, bree and arda make as much sense as middle-earth (though personally I think bree should be subsumed by middle-earth, and then removed from all questions that aren't actually about Bree; which is all of them)

• the-one-ring, rings-of-power, mithril make a certain amount of sense, and are well-scoped.

  • As an aside, I think there's sufficient reason to keep the-one-ring separate from rings-of-power

• elves, dwarves, orc are weird cases, because they're mostly used on Tolkien questions, and yet also refer to common fantasy elements. They're probably fine to leave as-is

• tolkien-languages makes sense to leave

• christopher-tolkien makes as much sense as tolkien does, as long as we restrict it in the same way; some questions would need clean-up

Answer 2

Leave 'em.

As per my stock objection to tag removal.

• As things stand, these tags are pretty harmless and possibly of minor use to anyone with a passing interest in specific elements of Tolkien-related works

• Mucking around with these tags on a systematic basis will result in the front page being disfigured with worthless edits for (at minimum) several weeks.

• As usual, I see no justification given to explain why messing around with these tags is of more benefit to the site than simply leaving them in situ.