Do we want to create a new Wizarding World tag?

Question

As of 12th March 2018, the Potterverse has a new name for the whole Harry Potter franchise - Wizarding World.

This term covers the whole range of Harry Potter media, not just the original seven books.

Do we want to create a new tag [wizarding-world] as the new catch-all tag for questions set in the Harry Potter world?

As far as I can tell, the arguments in favour of such a change would be:

• Granting greater distinction between questions about the Harry Potter books and questions about the Fantastic Beasts films, The Cursed Child and other parts of the franchise. Given that this is a constantly expanding franchise, we're going to have an increasing quantity of questions tagged with [harry-potter] which actually aren't about Harry Potter the character at all. Since the [harry-potter] tag is already very big it would arguably be helpful to distinguish clearly between questions based on the seven books and those based on other parts of the franchise.

• There is a precedent for tagging this way elsewhere on the site - for instance, separating [lord-of-the-rings] questions from [the-hobbit] questions whilst still having the catchall [tolkiens-legendariam] tag for them all.

• 'Wizarding World' is the new official term by which the franchise-creators wish the works in question to be referred. 'Harry Potter' is not an official term in the same way. Having the proper name in tag form makes the site look good. Lacking it doesn't.

The arguments against:

• Retagging all 5,174 (and growing) questions would take a Herculean group effort akin to the big edit event and muck up the front page for a bit.

• 'Harry Potter' is well known as a term of reference whereas 'Wizarding World' isn't (yet).

There are doubtless other points I haven't thought of. I don't have a strong opinion either way but thought that I should open it up to community discussion.

Answer 1

No. At least not yet.

'Harry Potter' is well known as a term of reference whereas 'Wizarding World' isn't (yet).

That's basically the main point here. Tags are supposed to be a quick way for people to find questions on a particular topic - including (especially!) people who aren't familiar with this site and its workings and policies, people who might not even have accounts here but are interested in reading our content. Right now, "Harry Potter" is FAR more recognisable than "Wizarding World" as a term for the Potterverse. Please let's not rename the tag to something that people wouldn't even know to look for.

In fact, wizarding-world would be a confusing name for a tag anyway (and a confusing name for a brand, IMO). There are plenty of fantasy universes which could be described as "wizarding worlds". Hell, Middle-Earth is a wizarding world, thanks to Gandalf and the other Istari. People would start putting wizarding-world on e.g. story-ID questions for books set in fantasy worlds involving wizards. Good tag names should usually be unambiguous, or at least the thing the tag is actually intended to be used for should be the most obvious thing for the name to refer to.

It maaaaay be that the rebranding effort will be wildly successful and at some point in the future everyone refers to the franchise/universe as "Wizarding World" rather than "the Harry Potter world". Maybe if that happens, we can have this discussion again. But at the moment, we're not there yet, and renaming the tag would almost certainly do more harm than good.

(I will say, though, that your other counterargument actually doesn't hold:

Retagging all 5,174 (and growing) questions would take a Herculean group effort akin to the big edit event and muck up the front page for a bit.

If we got a consensus to rename harry-potter to wizarding-world, a mod could do this in one fell swoop by merge-renaming the tag, without bumping any questions at all.)

Maybe a synonym?

All of that said, though, there's not much wrong with adding wizarding-world as a synonym of harry-potter, so that people who do come to our site searching under this more official name for the franchise can still get the right set of questions. Again, this can be done easily by a mod without needing to bump loads of posts.