Is it time for [villains] to get their just deserts?

Question

I recently noticed that we have a villains tag with 26 questions. Glancing through the list:

• most of them (sixteen?) are just random questions about characters who happen to be villains: for example, How tall is Galactus?, What did Mayor Wilkins do to Mr Trick?, Did Solomon Grundy get his name from the nursery rhyme?, Who controls the Watcher in the Water?;

• eight are ID questions (three story-ID, three character-ID, plus a couple more without ID tags), but I doubt "this story had a villain in it" is really a helpful distinction for an ID question, not enough to warrant being reflected in the tags;

• two actually are about villains in general - Why don't more villains die/become crippled? and Which Sci-Fi work introduced the idea of "Mad Scientists as villains"? - but again, I'm not sure if "villains" is a sufficiently well-defined or interesting topic to be worth its own tag.

Do we need this tag at all? If so, which questions should we be using it on?

Answer 1

Burninate it.

I can't think of anyone who would come here and use this tag to find questions about villains; and it seems that this tag wasn't applied correctly anyway.

From another perspective, it's unlikely that this tag will attract experts, or even enthusiasts (though I'm ready to stand corrected on this one).

It's one of those tags - along with love or super-hero or superpowers or supernatural-abilities - that seem to make sense, but in reality are not useful at all, unless used for questions about the concept of villains/superheros/superpowers/abilities/etc.

Just clean the tag to give it a swift and painless death.

Answer 2

Keep it

villains is one of dozens of tags about concepts that this site applies inconsistently, at the tagger's whim. They add a bit of flavo[u]r to the tagging system, are sometimes helpful, and aren't hurting anything. We could start a massive retagging effort to purge all the tags deemed unworthy, or we could just gaze at the tag map and be happy.

I'd rather focus our retagging efforts on things like fixing inconsistent usage of franchise and series tags (which Valorum is working on at the moment, it seems) or removing tags that are genuinely confusing. villains seems clear enough, and harmless, even if it's being used inconsistently.