What's up with the [sword-and-sorcery] tag?

Question

I see that we have the tag sword-and-sorcery, currently with 8 questions - 6 of which are story-identification, the other two closed as off topic.

We previously renamed this tag. But what should it actually be used for? Generally, our genre tags are for questions about the genre itself. But this tag doesn't seem to have any questions like that.

How should we be using it? (Do we even need it at all?)

Answer 1

I think we're using it correctly as is. Adding a subgenre to an identification question can really narrow down the possible results, or point someone to a better resource during their research.

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As an aside, I think we have an opportunity to discuss ways to boost our usage of genre tags, so they're more widely used. The lack of usage could be blamed on a number of reasons:

• Many ID questions come from new users, who don't know about our wealth of tagging options
  • Solution: Prompt them to add genre tags as part of our story ID guidance
• We don't retag answered story-id questions once an answer is accepted
  • Solution: Decide on some types of tags to add back to solved ID questions (such as most-relevant subgenre and a tag for the specific work)
• We don't have a good resource for looking at all our genres, or a way to see just genres
  • Solution: Make a Meta FAQ post (or an answer on the story ID FAQ) that lists our genre tags and their wikis, so we can point users to something tangible
  • And/or: Rename our genre tags to all have -genre appended to them, so searching "genre" in the tag box brings them all up

Perhaps it's worth opening a new discussion on these points. We've recently, but informally, established some different tagging guidelines for our "major" tags. DC, Marvel and Lord of the Rings universes all had major retagging efforts, and they have different (informal) stewards who help maintain the tagging system. There's even some formal support for this system based on a recent meta about a Harry Potter related tag.

If we applied those principles to story identification questions, I think we could:

• Increase tag usage and consistency
• Improve our ability to find possible duplicates
• Get the side-bonus of benefiting people who would say "Yes" to the question: Is it reasonable to assume some people might want to know about just that genre? (modified from the 2nd bullet on other linked meta answer)