I recently noticed a story-identification question with a lot of other tags, and I remember instinctively trimmed them down, as they seemed tangential to the I'd question. I can no longer find that question though. Nothing seemed amiss until I noticed others, and realising it might be more common than I thought started to look for prior meta discussion.
That's when I came across this four and half year old post:
What should we do about tags on story-id questions?
In summary:
Q: Should we only tag story-identification questions with tags that are specifically for story-id (story-identification, young-adult, novel, books, short-stories, etc), or have other tags as well (such as aliens, computers, time-travel etc)?
A: I think that it comes down to one of the purposes for tags, namely expertise. Someone who's an expert in werewolf is likely to have the background to answer story-identification questions about them.
I don't think this is bad necessarily, but there's probably a limit to what's useful. Adding a lot of tags like aliens which are also used outside of story-identification questions might end up making searching for non-id questions less user friendly some how? I think this might be especially true for some tags where being an expert in that topic doesn't necessarily mean you'd be good at identifying stories about them, say magic, which covers a wide range of questions.
But I'm not sure if our users actual experience. I'm also conscious that our site has changed a lot in the last almost 5 years, so add some recency to the discussion would be good.
What is your reaction when you see an identification question posted with lots of other tags? Trim them to the bare essentials (e.g. the id tag, relevant media-tags and 1-2 others), strip all but the id tag and media-tag? Leave it be?
For reference, here are some SEDE queries that show how tags are used with our identification tags:
identification tag | top media-tags | top non-media-tag |
---|---|---|
story-identification | books novel movie | aliens time-travel magic |
character-identification | comics movie | marvel star-wars dc |
episode-identification | comics tv | star-trek dc marvel |
Addendum:
I'm at least partly asking, as I noticed we don't have any advice on our How to ask a good story id question? meta-post.