Should we change [harry-potter] to [potter-verse]?

Question

Should we change harry-potter to potter-verse?

Reason(s) for:

• I feel that doing so removes the confusion about character tags, in that we're not asking about "Harry Potter" the character, we're asking about the body of work or the whole fictional universe / franchise.
• Looks neater

Reason(s) against:

• Major restructure / effort required
• Not everyone recognises "potter-verse" immediately

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Related: Harry Potter tag cleanup

Answer 1

Nope

Remember the main purposes of tags:

• To aid in searching, especially when the topic of a question may not be apparent from the title or body.
• To create feeds for the chatroom.
• To enable interested users to subscribe or block certain tags.

I’m not sure this proposed tag change helps fulfill any of these purposes.

• I think it should go without saying that replacing harry-potter, a commonly known term for J.K. Rowling’s universe among fans and laypeople, with potterverse, a much more narrowly recognized one, will make searches much more difficult. That is to say, people are almost always going to search by appending “harry potter” to their queries, not “potterverse.” The two bring up significantly different results, too: searching for “most powerful wizard allegedly harry potter” brings up our well-known question about why Dumbledore worked “at a glorified boarding school,” whereas just substituting “potterverse” brings up a bunch of listicles. We want the people searching for “harry potter” to come to our site.
• There doesn’t really seem to be any problem with the current harry-potter feeds, which scoop up main series questions, Cursed Child questions, and Fantastic Beasts questions. That is, we’re not missing questions.
• The same goes for subscriptions. Some people might want to subscribe to only main series questions, but it’s easy enough to do that simply by blocking the Cursed Child and Fantastic Beasts tags.

As for potential confusion with character tags, I think this is a non-issue. I’ve never heard of someone believing that they should only use the harry-potter tag for questions about Harry himself.

And of course, when it comes to it looking neater, that’s something of a matter of opinion. I personally think that, given that “Harry Potter” is the generally accepted name of the universe/franchise, it looks a whole lot neater. “Potterverse” is a somewhat ad-hoc coinage, and “Wizarding World of J.K. Rowling” is a mouthful, designed for advertising, and virtually unknown.

Answer 2

Based on our current usage, it makes sense to me to create potterverse as a synonym of harry-potter. I know I personally find it easy to think of it as the Potterverse than any of the other terms, but that term shouldn't supplant what's the most widely-used way of referring to that universe (see Adamant's answer). A synonym is a good compromise, as it complements the main tag by improving searches for the tag, and also when selecting the tag:

The nice "also: clark-kent" in this superman example shows that visually, you get a strong indicator that the synonym is how we refer to the universe here. So anyone accustomed to using the other term will see "Ah, his name stands for the whole thing." (a scenario that'd surely make Snape sneer with disdain for Potter's ego)

If for some reason we needed a tag specifically about Harry's character (and I really believe that we don't), we have the option of making a new tag, such as harry-james-potter to separate him out.