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I recently noticed that the tag is being used inconsistently. The tag wiki excerpt says:

Questions dealing with title/honorifics of certain characters in SFF works.

But while some of the tagged questions are indeed about titles of fictional characters:

... others are about titles of works of sci-fi or fantasy instead:

The questions tagged are roughly evenly split (8 vs 9) between these two different types of usage. Either one would be fine as a way of using a tag called , but we can't really keep using both: a given tag should have a single clear, unambiguous usage guidance.

Let's make a decision on this. There are few enough questions with this tag that it won't take long to retag half of them by hand if necessary.

How do we want to use the tag?

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I'm surprised this tag even exists.

We also have the problem that it's not being used everywhere it could be. There's about 3 dozen more questions that could potentially have the tag.

We already have , which may be the best solution here.

Currently, doesn't have a usage guidance. Instead of defining how the tag should be used, it defines what a name is.

We could fix these problems in one go by changing all honorific/ranks usage of into and adding the usage guidance of:

For questions about the names and titles of characters, including honorifics; names of cities and locations; or names of vessels, weapons and and objects. Questions can be in-universe or out-of-universe about topics such as origins, meanings, usage and pronunciations. *

And then slowly adding to those questions missing any such tag.

By having the tag encompass a larger variety of "names", it should make the tag easier to find and more likely to be used consistently. We could have plus , but I think we'd end up seeing them used incorrectly or not at all. Another reason I don't see more specific tags being generally useful is they're all intimately tied to being used alongside a specific work tag.

*Wording suggestions welcome. I just wrote something quickly that captures how we're already using and .

As for the remaining questions about the actual titles of a work, I think the tag should be renamed. I'm a little against , just because of the hundreds of story-id questions asking about titles, and feel that it may be used in place of or with *-identification where it doesn't fit. As an alternative, I think we could rename it to and have usage guidance of:

For questions about the meanings, origins and pronunciations of the titles of works, including books, chapters and songs.

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    I agree with merging the "honorifics" meaning of titles into the existing names tag. Not sure if I agree with lumping the "story-titles" meaning in there though. Questions about names/titles of characters or in-universe objects or locations and questions about titles of stories tend to be quite different and require different types of answers.
    – Rand al'Thor Mod
    Feb 7, 2017 at 12:42
  • @Randal'Thor Agreed with you, don't lump in "story-titles" with "name-titles".
    – Skooba
    Feb 8, 2017 at 13:54
  • Only problem keeping the tags separate is continued misuse. If a rename can improve it, go for it. But "story-titles" is bound to be misused with story-id, so we should use something else.
    – user31178
    Feb 8, 2017 at 14:17
  • @CreationEdge Past history suggests that that misuse would be a drop in the ocean compared to the number of people who post ID questions tagged e.g. short-stories or movie without the ID tag. We're constantly doing tag edits on new ID questions anyway, so this wouldn't add much to it. (And even the names tag could be misused on ID questions - "looking for the name of a story".) That said, if anyone has a better suggestion for the tag name, I'm all ears.
    – Rand al'Thor Mod
    Feb 8, 2017 at 15:42
  • @RandalThor Well, the whole thing is a drop in the bucket! Anyway, perhaps "title-explanation", similar to "plot-explanation"?
    – user31178
    Feb 8, 2017 at 15:45
  • @Skooba I made an update that removes the lumping
    – user31178
    Feb 8, 2017 at 16:26
  • Upvoted after your edit. Not sure if I agree with title-explanation - what if there are questions about story titles which aren't "why did this story have this title", like this one? - but the exact name of the tag will be easy to change by a mod-merge even after we've made all the necessary edits to questions.
    – Rand al'Thor Mod
    Feb 8, 2017 at 17:36
  • @RandalThor It's still asking for an explanation surrounding the usage of the word. I think it fits better especially for that question, which stood out as odd to me when going through examples
    – user31178
    Feb 8, 2017 at 17:41
  • Upvoted, but I would also suggest blacklisting the tag [titles] because it will get misused again even if you empty it out and put "DO NOT USE THIS TAG" in the tag wiki.
    – Kevin
    Feb 10, 2017 at 2:42
  • @Kevin Once it's been removed from all questions, it'll automatically disappear after a day or so and new users won't be able to recreate it. Blacklisting is normally reserved for very frequently misused tags, e.g. 'intrinsic' tags (for this site, science-fiction and fantasy).
    – Rand al'Thor Mod
    Feb 12, 2017 at 12:42
  • @Randal'Thor, has an agreed usage been decided, a few of the changes you've made recently go against the tag wikis for the tags you've deleted.
    – Edlothiad
    Feb 12, 2017 at 14:34
  • @Edlothiad This answer has got a lot of upvotes, so I've started to make the required edits. Will fix the tag wikis once it's all done and dusted.
    – Rand al'Thor Mod
    Feb 12, 2017 at 14:36
  • I've now retagged all titles questions, and rewritten the wikis for the names tag and the new title-explanation tag. Let me know if I buggered anything up.
    – Rand al'Thor Mod
    Feb 12, 2017 at 16:48

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