Altered Carbon/ Takeshi Kovacs tags

Question

I am a little bit confused about the tag policy in case of book series vs adaptations:

We have currently tag altered-carbon described as

"For questions about Richard K. Morgan's novel "Altered Carbon" and its adaptations."

All good, we have one tag for the book and the Netflix series. However, Richard Morgan also wrote other books in this series: Broken Angels, Woken Fury and recently Altered Carbon: Download Blues

At the same time, Netflix continues to produce the second season of its adaptation (presumably based on the second book), which is still called Altered Carbon

So if I'd like to ask a question about, let's say, 3rd book, should I create woken-fury and then broken-angels for questions regarding the 2nd one? Or maybe I should make takeshi-kovacs encapsulating the whole series in a book form? If the latter, should the questions tagged altered-carbon asking for the book version also be tagged with the takeshi-kovacs while continuing to use altered-carbon for the Netflix series?

Answer 1

The pattern I've seen established with other works is to have a series/universe tag and, if required, a work tag. For example, there's the-lord-of-the-rings for the series as a whole, and individual tags for the books: the-fellowship-of-the-ring, the-two-towers and the-return-of-the-king.

I don't like takeshi-kovacs as a series tag, since a tag should be clear about whether it refers to a work or a character; takeshi-kovacs-series is ugly, but less ambiguous.

That said, I would suggest we leave altered-carbon as is, and update the usage to say that it applies to either the series of books or Netflix series and to the first book. The advantage to not changing the current usage of the tag is that it doesn't require existing questions to be re-tagged. Not adding a new series tag also avoids re-tagging.

(Further, if there aren't a lot of questions in the altered-carbon tag, then maybe it's fine to use it for all the books, and just specify in a question if it's about a particular book.)