We have lord-of-the-rings, the-hobbit, silmarillion, tolkien, rings-of-power, and middle-earth. And they're just the ones I've noticed. I'm inclined to think that anyone interested in any of these will be interested in all of them, so the tags should all be merged into middle-earth. Am I completely wrong?
3 Answers
The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and The Silmarillion are all separate works, so merging them would not be desirable. The other tags are meant to specify particular areas of Tolkien's legendarium. Someone wanting to learn more about the Rings for instance can look at that particular tag. The same goes for Middle Earth or for Tolkien himself. Therefore I don't think that any of the tags you specified should be merged...(and if they were to be merged a more apt name would be something like tolkiens-legendarium)
-
3I generally prefer fewer tags over more, but I agree with your answer. I don't love the idea of rings-of-power, but I would imagine it is really hard to search for questions specifically on the rings without getting mixed up with general lord-of-the-rings questions, so it does make sense.– BeofettDec 6, 2012 at 20:05
-
@Beofett Definitely agree with less tags is more. rings-of-power seems to be necessary as you say, since if you search "rings" with LOTR, you inevitably don't gain any specificity.– NominSimDec 6, 2012 at 20:12
I disagree with merging all the tags, but I agree that they are used inconsistently and we should do some cleanup.
tolkien is necessary because not everything Tolkien wrote is set in Middle-Earth.
When it comes to Middle-Earth, I think we have broadly three audiences:
- People who've seen the Peter Jackson movies and are mostly interested in the movies and how they relate to the book.
- People who've seen Tolkien's influence (for example, from playing D&D), and might have read The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings and just maybe the Silmarillion.
- People who're interested in Middle-Earth minutiae, but don't know all of Christopher's publications by heart yet.
A good tagging system would help people in category 1 and 2 quickly find the questions they are interested in. Here, lord-of-the-rings and the-hobbit will appeal to audiences 1 and 2, but middle-earth is likely to come as too detailed. Audience 1 will likely ignore silmarillion.
I'm not convinced we need rings-of-power or akallabeth, or gandalf, saruman, sauron, ... (See the related discussions on character tags, such as the latest one.) In fact, I've gone ahead and merged akallabeth into silmarillion.
We should make a complete list of Tolkien-related tags (I don't have the time just now) and figure out how they're currently used and whether we want that to continue.
Once we as a community reach a decision, we should edit the relevant tag wikis and get at least most of the questions tagged the way we want them.
Could we merge the-one-ring into rings-of-power please? They go to the same posts because of the way the One Ring is magically linked to the Rings of Power, and the two tags just take up precious space of the limit of 5 tags.
-
2An answer on a downvoted question isn't going to get much attention, I'm afraid. I'd suggest adding a new question.– TRiGJun 5, 2014 at 10:17
rings-of-poweras originally conceieved was NOT meant to be Tolkien specific, they can (and do) include other powerful rings (e.g. Green Lantern ones). Wiki for the tag makes it clear. Majority of questions are from LOTR, but not all.