Tolkien tags - the way forward

Question

Jason Baker's answer to Let's figure out our Tolkien tags provides an excellent description of the situation as it currently stands with tags related to the Tolkien legendarium, but it doesn't really do much to suggest a path forward, especially for the tolkien tag.

The purpose of this meta post is to establish some consensus on what to do with our Tolkien tags:

- How should the tolkien and middle-earth tags be used?

- What tag should we use for the Tolkien legendarium as a whole?

Either of the tolkien and middle-earth tags could be used as a general legendarium tag, and both have partially been used in that way so far. But the latter has a tag wiki saying it should only be for questions specifically about the Middle-Earth region, while the former is an author tag and therefore subject to this meta post; although its tag wiki says it should be for questions about Tolkien's works, people have in recent weeks been removing it from questions not about Tolkien himself. On the other hand, it would be nice to have a general legendarium tag: works like LotR, the Hobbit, the Silmarillion, etc. are clearly in the same universe, and it's one of the biggest and most famous fantasy universes out there.

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When making this decision, let's try not to worry too much about existing usage patterns for these tags. How they've been used so far is very inconsistent, and we shouldn't let the large volume of poorly tagged questions stop us from creating a consistent system.

If nothing else, we can make sure new questions will be tagged consistently from now on, thus reducing the problem to a finite one; the hundreds of existing Tolkien questions can then be retagged at our leisure, bit by bit over months or years. Let's not worry about the size of the task when deciding on a course of action - adding the Star Trek tag to hundreds of questions is also a mammoth task, and we have enough willing helpers. It's more important to make ourselves a good system than to minimise the work we need to do. Mod tools such as tag merges will also be available if needed.

Answer 1

Keep middle-earth for questions about the geographical area, tolkien for the author himself, and a new tolkien-legendarium for his works as a whole. Also, possibly a new arda tag.

This would mean all questions tagged middle-earth or simarillion would also get the tolkien-legendarium tag.

How would this work?

• As according to this meta answer that lays some guidelines for author tags:

  If the question is asking about a) aspects of the author's life, or b) aspects of the author's work that are not specific to a single work or franchise, then we tag the question with the name of the author.

  So tolkien should probably be used for questions about J.R.R. Tolkien as a person, or things that aren't specific to a specific work of his.

• Jason says in his answer:

  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.

  I think this is probably a good idea. TL;DR: use middle-earth for questions about the (actually pretty small) location of middle-earth. For example, "How big was middle-earth?". Do note that Beleriand, Númenor, and other locations were not in Middle-earth, but were still in Arda, the name for the whole earth. I'm not sure whether we should make an arda tag however.

  We may want that tag, and hopefully it would be used on questions such as the middle-earth one, and would go in conjunction with a tag like middle-earth or beleriand (if that doesn't exist already, it should (i.e other location tags like middle-earth)), but maybe it's unnecessary for that reason. I'd be in favor of creating it now, but possibly not retroactively retagging. That might be it's own meta post though... ("do we want [arda]")

• As for the legendarium as a whole: Make tolkien-legendarium. This would be used for pretty much everything related to his works, however would only sometimes go with the tolkien tag. For example, "Did Tolkien smoke?" would not get that tag, but "Did Tolkien design the Valar to be based on Greek gods?" would. (both of these were off the top of my head, pretty bad questions)

  This one is pretty intuitive, but I think it's probably a good idea. Again, this would go on really any question about Tolkien's works, not just the franchise as a whole (i.e. "how was the lotr movies marketed" would probably get it, but "how tall are hobbits" would also).

Answer 2

Leave 'em.

As per my stock objection to massive tag updates.

• 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 that that OP has offered no concrete justification to explain why messing around with these tags is of more benefit to the site than simply leaving them in situ.