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Back in the beginning, I asked the question "Do we need a sci-fi tag?". We went for no, I purged from the existing questions, and we kept killing the thing whenever it reared its ugly head again.

Is it still a ugly head, now that we have fantasy?

Tony Meyer made a good point on a comment to that question about reconsidering this policy.

I (and perhaps others) have been removing the tag whenever it appeared. Do we want to reconsider this now that we are SF&F? It would be a way for someone uninterested in [fantasy] to hide all fantasy questions and vice-versa. However, probably 40% of questions would need the sci-fi tag and 40% of questions need the fantasy tag, which seems like too much noise. (Probably the tag should now die too).

Should we resurrect these tags to differentiate the two big topics or should we keep them at bay?

2 Answers 2

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No.

I can see the value to the small subsets of SF&F users that are only interested in SF or F, but:

  • It opens up the "what is SF"/"what is F" question, when merging the sites nicely killed it.
  • Too many questions will need the tag. Allowing for some overlap (hopefully having neither tag rather than both), it's logical to assume that nearly half the site's questions will have one tag or the other. That effectively reduces us to 4 tags per question, and means that the tweet/title tag will almost always be or .
  • New/casual users aren't going to know that these should be added and so it'll need too much work from other users to go through and tag all the questions appropriately. If we don't tag them all as best as possible, then the tags are of little use anyway.
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    thanks for communicating what I was having trouble communicating :) I've been working on the same answer for 5 minutes, until I saw yours.
    – morganpdx
    Commented Feb 3, 2011 at 23:58
  • Goods arguments, I would just add that those are Meta Tags
    – DavRob60
    Commented Feb 4, 2011 at 1:27
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    yes, I am strongly against these tags -- we don't allow [wordpress] on wordpress, [apple] on apple.. and here there are two of them. Same rule.
    – Jeff Atwood
    Commented Feb 4, 2011 at 2:17
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    @Jeff: It's more like the iphone and osx tags on Apple, but with a big difference: SFF subgenre classifications are highly subjective.
    – user56
    Commented Feb 4, 2011 at 21:49
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There are no questions tagged , and I just killed off the 5 questions tagged .

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