What tags should be used alongside story-identification, and similar questions?

Question

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.

_{"Am I Out Of Touch" meme}

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)?

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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.

Answer 1

Here's how I search.

Finding possible duplicates:

• I search for the name of the work. If that's too many results I make it more specific with some of the following: story-identification, is:a, the author's name or year published. No other tags are used consistently enough to be helpful here.

Media tags:

• I use media tags sometimes when searching for ID questions to answer (because there are specialized tools to help find certain types of media, such as anidb for anime).
• I feel like fan-fiction is a solid, helpful tag. I don't use it much when searching though because we don't get many fanfic questions.
• I don't ever use media tags otherwise

Generic tags:

• I rarely search for them. When I do, it's with a franchise tag. Generic tags are applied too inconsistently to be helpful. (However, having these tags on the post may help the post show up even when the words don't appear in the post. That can be helpful.)

Answer 2

Personally, as someone who posts story-identification fairly often (curse my failing memory...), I habitually add media tags and often do add some of the non-media tags if I feel they're a major part of the story I'm looking for.

Part of why I do this is simply because they're there. Part of it is that, especially for the media tags, this serves as a failsafe for me in case I was so excited about getting to explaining the fragments of plot I remember that I forget to mention it was a comic book. Some of it is that I'm never entirely certain how much of the "Related Questions" is based on text and how much on tags, so I figure the tagging makes it more likely that, if someone starts posting a question about their vampire story (or researching a query), they're more likely to see the extant vampire story question on the sidebar of related questions if it's tagged. I know it's worked for me before.

I think the key point for me in using the non-media tags is whether it's integral. If I'm asking a question about a warrior in a fantasy world, adding the magic tag usually doesn't help because sure, there's magic, but it's not an integral part of the plot. Now if I were posting, looking for a book that involves a unique magical system that's important to the plot, that tag makes sense. Ditto that it doesn't necessarily make sense to add aliens for every science fiction story that has aliens somewhere in it, but a book about a particular race and how they're so alien to humanity does deserve the tag.

And I do occasionally use the media tags explicitly for searches, although it's usually for a "let's get a dozen specific results to see if I can get an easy answer here" situation before I start paring down the query to be more general.