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There have been some recent discussions about Star Trek, Harry Potter and My Little Pony tags. While Star Trek tags seem to usually be prefixed with star-trek- (see the tags page) this seems to be inconsistent. For instance, the recently discussed has really no meaning for people that are not familiar with Rowling literature. In order to bring consistency to the tag system (which appears to me increasingly chaotic), I suggest to have some rules for names of sub-tags of a given Universe.

For instance, the tag should be or . It would make sense to apply this to all such universe-specific tags, wouldn't it? What do you think?

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  • This makes sense from the point of view of someone unfamiliar with a topic, which if they are curious will hopefully bring them to click through and learn about it?
    – Xantec
    Apr 29, 2012 at 21:54
  • @Xantec: I could image collisions. For instance, there's the "The IT Crowd" happy place, which I thought of first when I read the meta question.
    – bitmask
    Apr 29, 2012 at 21:56

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It is, for the most part, only the series titles that have tags. and are the primary exceptions, because the mains are short (), or highly ambiguous (). In general, I don't think there is a reason to make franchise/series-specific tags for characters or concepts until there becomes a strong overlap between two (or more) series. It seems, for example, unwieldy and superfluous to have or . Should there arise a problematic overlap between series, we should create series tags for them and change the main tag excerpt to instruct users to use the appropriate series tag.

As for the tag in question, , I don't think it's a particularly necessary or helpful tag, so I have removed it from the two questions it was on; it will disappear within 24 hours.

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was not a good tag and is now gone.

We only have tags for specific aspects of a work or franchise if it is a big franchise and a well-defined aspect that it makes sense to filter on. For example, specific Star Wars movies, or Tolkien's major works.

We have a few character tags. These should be avoided unless there's a good reason to have them: character names can be searched for. , and exist largely because Q is hard to search for, as are R2-D2 and C-3PO because they're often misspelled.

When there are tags that refer to a specific aspect of a larger universe, the format universe-aspect is preferable, because it lets people who ignore, subscribe to or search in tags use a wildcard universe*. But, as I wrote above, such tags should only be created when there is a real need for them, not “just in case” or on a “why not” basis.

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    +1. Thanks for the heads up prior to taking action.
    – Major Stackings
    Apr 29, 2012 at 22:48
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I think that would lead to some very unwieldy tag names. If you have to preface every universe specific tag with what universe it's from, that would get clunky. What about characters? Specific locations? I think that what it is regarding should be explained in the tag wiki, not in the tag itself.

With Star Trek, it's a matter of separate and fairly distinct series. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is the name of the series. That issue doesn't arise with Harry Potter or LotR.

Even if you use hp-, that's not much clearer than just , and goes against the convention of spelling out the series name like the star-trek- tags do.

I do agree that some of the tags are confusing, but I think the solution is better tag wikis, and getting rid of superfluous tags. Do we need a tag for every concept, location, and character in every work? I don't know anyone who would answer questions and ignore or questions. They seem totally unnecessary to me, since they don't really provide much more organizational benefit.

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