Do we really need the Marauders map tag?

Question

A user has just gone and made 17 tag edits in 2 minutes adding marauders-map to all the questions that come up when you search the term Marauders Map.

Does this tag benefit us in any way?

We already have a meta answer that would possibly answer this question, suggesting that tags (such as butterbeer) aren't helpful tags and don't satisfy the criteria that tags should have.

However another meta posts exists which suggest we use tags creatively to get a wider description of a question using tags. Although the outcome of that answer seems to be "do what your heart desires" which isn't very conclusive.

What do we do with marauders-map? Do we keep it a la DVK's answer, or delete it a la User 56's answer?

Answer 1

This is not a yes or no answer, but a point of discussion.

Harry Potter is one of our largest tags. There's a huge body of questions. These questions can be hard to filter by simple text searches, because searchable terms are often used in questions that aren't about that term.

Want to know more about just Hermione? Good luck narrowing that down. Want to know just about Slytherin? Did you mean Salazar himself or the Hogwarts House? How do you filter out every time a user merely mentions "Slytherin" when they're just talking about a Slytherin, like Draco?

Tagging helps facilitate not just answering the question, but later finding the question and it's answers. Aside from perusing out of personal interest, we have a strong history of citing other answers to strengthen new ones, or to find duplicates.

Our top tags on this site are so large that they and their related tags are often curated by "specialists", people that take an interest in that work and are knowledgeable about it. We have different levels of granularity and grouping in these tags, and should keep that in mind when discussing whether or not to keep a tag. The structure and conventions that work for Lord of the Rings is different than Marvel properties. They're different bodies of work, and we shouldn't try to force a one-size-fits-all tagging policy around them. Story Identification is a whole different beast from Star Trek. We've never really tagged individual Harry Potter films or books, but for Star Wars we have a need to create those individual tags before the movies are even released!

We have the flexibility to make our own tag map, and have our experts help curate and guide new users, write usage guidance, etc.

So, I would encourage people to vote based on:

• Is a Marauder's Map a reasonably helpful tag for people of the Harry Potter Fandom?
• Is it reasonable to assume some people might want to know about just that subject?
• Is the tag unlikely, when used appropriately, to interfere with other Harry Potter tagging (such as the 5 tag limit)?

This seems a more reasonable approach to me than voting on a Harry Potter tag the same way you would for a Game of Thrones tag. Different fandoms have different needs, different things they want to know, and different types of source material.

Answer 2

Yes, it should have a tag. Everything (within reason) should have a tag.

We currently have 49+ questions that specifically relate to the Marauder's Map as well as a further 148 mentions of it in other questions and answers. It's clearly something that fans of Harry Potter have taken great interest in and something that's probably worthy of its own tag (in the same way that aficionados of the lightsaber have tagged their questions).

For example, a question about a specific lightsaber fight in Phantom Menace should have a star-wars tag as well as a phantom-menace and possibly a lightsaber and jedi tag.

That'll allow people to locate questions about their own interest areas more easily.

_{^{How should we handle tag hierarchies?}}

Answer 3

No

We don't need that level of granularity to get good answers.

Tags are for sorting your question into specific, well-defined categories.
_{MSE "Why do we tag questions?"}

For a tag to be used, it should fulfil both these requirements. Tags for random items, such as the Marauder's Map, are not well-defined categories. We have a magical-items tag if we really want to tag the question as about an item.

In addition, marauders-map is overly specific, and not common enough to justify have a whole tag for it. Anything less than 50 uses in the history of the site should be suspect in my opinion. marauders-map clocks in at 19 (as of posting this answer).

Answer 4

No

A tag indicates what kind of expertise is needed to answer the question.

There will be harry-potter experts, perhaps even specific harry-potter-books experts or harry-potter-films experts, but I really doubt that anyone would call themselves a marauders-map expert.

Answer 5

No, because the five-tag limit makes it impractical to tag at this level of granularity.

OP describes this:

A user has just gone and made 17 tag edits in 2 minutes adding marauders-map to all the questions that come up when you search the term Marauders Map.

If we tag items with the same level of importance and complexity as the Marauder's Map, we'd probably need tags for all of the following:

• The Sorting Hat
• The Sword of Gryffindor (might be lumped in with the Hat, but I'd be skeptical of that arrangement)
• Each of the Deathly Hallows, separately
• Horcruxes generally (but probably not a separate tag for each)
• The Pensieve
• Individual major characters, or groups of them (hp-golden-trio, fred-and-george, hogwarts-staff, etc.)

The problem is that there can plausibly be questions with more than four of the above elements simultaneously. When you add the base harry-potter tag, that's more than we're allowed.

We may want to keep these tags in a more limited role.

If, on the other hand, we only use these tags on questions where they are directly the subject of the question (as opposed to just briefly mentioned), they may indeed prove useful. But that is not the question that OP asked.