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The tag currently has 49 questions but is used for a lot of different things. Though the tag wiki/excerpt only mentions the book and film, it is used for the following:

  • The book from 1990
  • The film from 1993
  • The Jurassic Park trilogy
  • The Jurassic franchise as a whole

I propose we should create the following tags to disambiguate it:

We don't need trilogy tags, as far as I'm aware they aren't used anywhere else. Whilst we're at it we should probably also disambiguate which is currently used for the second trilogy and the film with that name. It should only be used for the film so should be removed where appropriate.

Note: This is a request to see what the community thinks of this idea to clean up the tag, please do not go ahead and start doing so on your own accord. Also if this does go ahead when fixing tags also fix everything in a post, remember we will be bumping old posts, and close/reopen vote if appropriate (I haven't been through these so not sure if it's an issue).

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    I'd suggest putting your proposal in an answer and leave the question as a sort of "what should we do"; it's easier to tell what voters mean like that. Do upvotes on the question mean they agree with your specific proposal or that it just needs to be cleaned up?
    – Mithical
    Jun 13, 2018 at 9:39
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    @Mithrandir Tag cleanup questions on metas around the network usually have the suggestion in the question. It's what they do on SO, for example.
    – TheLethalCarrot Mod
    Jun 13, 2018 at 9:40
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    *shrugs* What I've seen (and encourage) around the network differs. I think that less ambiguity is preferable :). I like the suggestion, but I feel that it'd be better to be clearer.
    – Mithical
    Jun 13, 2018 at 9:45
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    @Mithrandir I don't see what's unclear about it, UVs = yes lets do this, DVs = no lets not... If you really want I can change it but until multiple people are "confused" by this I see no reason to.
    – TheLethalCarrot Mod
    Jun 13, 2018 at 9:47
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    @TheLethalCarrot - Upvotes might mean " we should talk about this" rather than "we should do this"
    – Valorum
    Jun 13, 2018 at 11:44
  • This is the sort of model we should follow; scifi.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7065/…. Question is question. Answer is voted on
    – Valorum
    Jun 13, 2018 at 13:19
  • This is a question, and there's an answer below which can be voted on, @Valorum
    – Edlothiad
    Jun 13, 2018 at 15:11
  • I never knew that Jurassic Park was a book. I guess you learn something new everyday ; )
    – Simpleton
    Jun 14, 2018 at 16:29
  • Cleaning up Jurassic Park is a pretty big job; youtube.com/watch?v=63UlBsdElsY
    – Valorum
    Jun 14, 2018 at 18:22

4 Answers 4

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Bear in mind that Jurassic Park originally was not only a single book, but it also had a sequel named The Lost World.

The simple seems too generic, and would be inaccurate (The Lost World was published later, in 1995).

I suggest the following scheme:

Books

I suggest to use or . There are only two books, so I don't think that it is necessary to have two separate tags, in addition to one that encomprise them both.

Movies

Similar to the books, we could have a generic tag named , and this time I would also keep the old ones that pertain to every single one. So:

I don't think that there is need to differentiate between the trilogies, a question labelled with the appropriate movie tag is sufficiently categorized.

Series

We can probably use the simple here, or even or , whichever more reflects the standard used for other franchises.

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  • I don't have strong opinions about the tagging as a whole, as long as it is clear an makes sense when actually using them in a question. I'll edit my answer, anyway. The second book was the inspiration for the second movie, an interesting novel but not as good as the first, but it featured Ian Malcolm, so it is still a fun read. The third movie, plotwise, IIRC was made up of a kind of patchwork of episodic parts of the two books that were not used on the first two movies, which is the reason why, if you ask me, it is not a great movie.
    – Sekhemty
    Jun 20, 2018 at 15:53
  • jurassic-park for the series/franchise seems fine here to me with regards to the rest of the proposal. Not too sure about the -movies and -books/novels suffixes though.
    – TheLethalCarrot Mod
    Jun 20, 2018 at 16:08
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Suggestions

I suggest tagging the book with the tag to make concrete that it is separate and to ensure it is more clear what that tag is used for, without the year I see it as quite probable that people would mistag questions with the book tag.

I agree with the rest of the hierarchy proposed above, using as the overarching franchise tag and otherwise just having separate film/book tags. I don't think needs to be renamed, but I disagree with it's current use as a "trilogy tag" (as descried below), and should be used exclusively for the 2015 film.

Below I've outlined various policies and conventions and why I think the proposed suggestion makes sense.

From the current usage, using a single tag for two works and two "franchises" (I say "franchises" as one seems to be a sub-franchise of the other) is against our policies on franchise vs author vs works tags. From the answer linked, we see that for works and franchises questions should:

  • If the question is about a work of fiction, it always gets a tag; if we have to create one, we do that (give it a tag wiki, etc.) If there's confusion over what to call it, bring it to meta.
  • If the work in question is part of a larger franchise, also give it that tag always. This makes it easier for people to follow/ignore/etc. one tag and cover the entire franchise.

As such users who want to follow the entire franchise ( in the above case) can choose not to follow any of the material from the books, similarly, those who only want to follow specific films (e.g. the first) can do so without having to follow the entire franchise.

Tag names

The proposed tag names also seem to be in accordance with our tagging habits. With regards to the difference between the book and the adaptation, sometimes we decide two tags is unnecessary, however when there's significant difference we may decide on providing two tags (Exhibit B).

Not tagging trilogies.

The most glaring example of such, comes from Star Wars, where we have the universe tag () and the individual film tags (). As most people know Star Wars is famously split into 3 trilogies, the Original Trilogy, the Prequel Trilogy and the Sequel Trilogy, however no tags exist for them, and there isn't really a need for such tagging, given it is all one canon.
That being said, we do have a few trilogy tags, when they exist in separate canons () or when it's a trilogy of books ().

In this case, leaving it as proposed above (without trilogy tags) seems perfectly acceptable.

Appending "series" to [jurassic-park] for the franchise tag ()

While this may not be the most beautiful, we've become quite fond of them:

The series appendix tends to be favoured against the franchise appendix, although they really are interchangeable.

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  • I agree with changing the books tag to [jurassic-park-1990] to be less ambiguous. If we do that it would probably be best to make [jurassic-park] a synonym of [jurassic-park-series].
    – TheLethalCarrot Mod
    Jun 13, 2018 at 10:17
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    I'm not sure if we need to disambiguate the book and the film, but if we do, our current standard is using -year for films. I'm not sure if it's a good idea to reverse that here.
    – SQB
    Jun 13, 2018 at 11:41
  • @SQB that isn't being reversed here, both get a year tag. I'm also unsure how similar the book and the film is, but IIRC, various family members have stated it is rather different
    – Edlothiad
    Jun 13, 2018 at 11:42
  • Ah, I missed that.
    – SQB
    Jun 13, 2018 at 11:43
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    I'm assuming the tag details hold more information, but it's worth noting that not everyone will have an encyclopedic memory for release dates. For what it's worth descriptive rather than year based tags might be more helpful. Especially when considering release years will vary across markets.
    – Jontia
    Jun 14, 2018 at 10:39
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    @Jontia this was voted against elsewhere on meta I believe, at least for films, as [jurassic-Park-movie] (1993) and [jurassic-Park-movie] (2033) will need to be distinguished. Labelling it book may be possible but I’d have to check with policies and tagging conventions. The tag wiki excerpt would indeed contain this info
    – Edlothiad
    Jun 14, 2018 at 10:55
  • I'll keep checking to see if I can find that thread. In theory double tags can help distinguish what's going on [Jurassic-park][movie] and [Jurassic-park][novel] for example. But that's not something that the search on the site is really set up to allow for.
    – Jontia
    Jun 14, 2018 at 11:11
  • @Jontia I personally don’t like media tags, and only really find them a reasonable exception when the original and adaptation are very similar. The meta would be on the topic of [xyz-book] [xyz-movie]
    – Edlothiad
    Jun 14, 2018 at 11:58
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This previous discussion on franchise tags discourages the use of the suffix franchise, and by extension series, in tag names.

The discussion here, related to The Expanse, confirms the -year suffix style for additional media and recommends clarity over separating novels from tv series and the franchise as a whole.

The policy here, core element of expertise, suggests being liberal with tags for individual works of fiction.

This English Language question that I posted franchise and series, didn't get much attention, but the one detailed response post mentioned several times that the words franchise and series are very context based. By their nature tags often lack context. While the details are available, tags have to be meaningful without the tag description as that is how the commonly appear.

Based on these links I would recommend the following tags

- For the franchise as a whole
- For the book
- The original film

And so on, with the rest of the tags applying only to individual works. There does not seem to be a strong need to have "part franchise" tags. The works are (with the possible exception of the most recent two films) only loosely connected. Any question spanning more than one work, How to hide from a T-rex could rely on just the franchise tag without any issues.

Potentially, if Jurassic World has legs as series of films the equivalent franchise/works tags would be;

- For the franchise
- For the film of that year
- etc.

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  • I don't mind doing it this way but the problem is people will user the franchise tag for the film. Just creates more editing that needs to be done.
    – TheLethalCarrot Mod
    Jun 19, 2018 at 12:55
  • I concede the point, but I don't know if it matters. While a question may be specifically about the film, the franchise tag would not be "wrong" on that question. It is still within the franchise. The confusion you mention is one of the reasons I'm not entirely behind the year suffix. A user might not know it, but they will know if they read [a-story-novel] or watched [a-story-film]. Especially when the year is close. But that has other problems like the comment on another answer about [jurassic-park-movie] 1993 and [jurassic-park-movie] 2033.
    – Jontia
    Jun 19, 2018 at 12:57
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    Oh of course but the year suffix seems to be agreed upon at some other point so not much we can do about that in context with this.
    – TheLethalCarrot Mod
    Jun 19, 2018 at 12:59
  • I like this suggestion!
    – Edlothiad
    Jun 19, 2018 at 17:10
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We need an overarching franchise tag.

From our policy on individual work vs franchise tags:

If the work in question is part of a larger franchise, also give it that tag always. This makes it easier for people to follow/ignore/etc. one tag and cover the entire franchise. (For example, I believe all questions about MCU movies should be tagged as such, even if the question is localized to one movie, so I only have to follow one tag.)

We shouldn't split the tag into individual tags for books, films, etc. which aren't linked together by the system. If we did that, there'd be no easy way for interested people to find a list of all questions about all works in the franchise.

I don't know this franchise, but a quick glance at Wikipedia suggests that might be a good name for the franchise tag - or possibly to distinguish it from tags specifically for the single book or film entitled Jurassic Park.

What to do with individual books and films within the franchise - whether they deserve their own individual tags, a la Star Wars, or not, a la Harry Potter - is up to the experts in this particular franchise. But for good bookkeeping we certainly need one overarching tag for all these questions, regardless of what subtags we use within that structure..

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    Well the film tags already exist, the franchise tag should probably be [jurassic-park-series] as outlined in the question so it's less ambiguous with the film and in line with current tags.
    – TheLethalCarrot Mod
    Jun 14, 2018 at 15:01
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    It would also include the books, was this not clear from either the Q or the answer?
    – Edlothiad
    Jun 14, 2018 at 17:18
  • I agree with this because the "World" films are sequels to the "Park" franchise, we need a tag that links everything together. We also don't have a huge amount of them, but enough that one tag won't suffice.
    – Skooba
    Jun 14, 2018 at 18:32
  • @Skooba can you explain how the proposed franchise tag here is different to the ones proposed in the two posts above? ([jurassic-park-series])
    – Edlothiad
    Jun 15, 2018 at 5:39
  • Presumably the problem with [jurassic-park-series] is which one? The books, the first 3 films and the Jurassic World films could all be fairly called a series. [jurassic-park-franchise] would explicitly be all three. I think I might have to go to english.stackexchange.com and clear up my usage of the words 'series' and 'franchise'. The suffix -universe might also be appropriate, similar to MCU. At least until Jurassic Park Universe, the one set in space is released in 2034.
    – Jontia
    Jun 15, 2018 at 9:19
  • This meta discussion; scifi.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/528/… seems to come down against using the word franchise in a tag quite strongly.
    – Jontia
    Jun 15, 2018 at 10:16
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    @Jontia hence my decision to use series, it might not be the best name but people have previously expressed great distaste for the term franchise suffix. I think the same goes for "universe" which is only really the case for marvel/dc entities. I agreed with series because they're a series of jurassic films (and book)
    – Edlothiad
    Jun 15, 2018 at 13:41
  • @Edlothiad for what it's worth, my reading of the anti-franchise wording discussion suggested that the tag for the whole franchise should be [jurassic-park], then there would probably need to be [jurassic-park-novel] or novels similar to [the-expanse-novels] I just think the "series" suffix isn't clear about which series it might mean. The series of books, the series of 5 films, the first series of 3 films, etc. And I don't see how the word series could be applied to mean all of them. The books and the films do not form a single series.
    – Jontia
    Jun 15, 2018 at 14:57
  • @Jontia this is a valid point, and probably worthy of it's own answer. I'm hesitant, however to name it [jurassic-park-novel] as that is something we almost never do. The year is usually sufficient, combined with a good tag wiki, it can be made clear.
    – Edlothiad
    Jun 19, 2018 at 10:18

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