How should we handle tag hierarchies?

Question

Current Context

We seem to have wound up in a position where we have some weird tag hierarchy issues on this site which have lead to inconsistent tagging practices.

I'll point out some specific examples, but I think it would be helpful to establish a clearer overall policy for the site.

The main question is: how do we want to handle tagging when there are a variety of tags specific to a franchise that range from very general to very specific?

In previous discussions, I've seen both the suggestion that specific tags should only be used for very popular titles. For us, this clearly includes things like star-trek, harry-potter, and star-wars, as well as some others (although "very popular" isn't very well defined, in my opinion).

However, I've also seen an answer implying that franchise tags should only be used for questions that cover multiple titles within the franchse, and, in fact, that's exactly what the tag wiki for star-trek says:

American science fiction franchise created by Gene Roddenberry. Use this tag when asking about multiple series in the Star Trek canon or as a whole.

However, this qualifier is not applied to star-wars, and the franchise tag seems to be applied to everything related to the franchise, regardless of whether the question is relevant to a single work or not (e.g. 30 out of 31 questions tagged phantom-menace are also tagged star-wars).

Similarly, harry-potter has no such disclaimer in its wiki, and, in fact, there do not seem to be any title-specific sub-tags... but there are a bunch of sub-tags that aren't specific to a single title (e.g. voldemort, hogwarts, wandlore, etc.).

This issue also extends to include how we handle author tags:

• For books and short stories, use the author's name as a tag (e.g. isaac-asimov). For media franchises, use the franchise name as a tag, e.g. star-trek.

Yet clearly we aren't using jk-rowling that way. Out of 1677 harry-potter questions, only 30 are tagged with the author, even though many of those questions are specific to books.

Of course, that raises an additional question: should author tags be used for movies or shows based off of those books? Does it matter if the author had direct input into the creation of the show/movie, such as George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones?

Because of this, which seems rather a mess (at least to me), I believe we need to clarify our policy on the following points:

Moving Forward

1. Should franchise tags be used in conjunction with more specific tags that are sub-sets of that franchise, such as sith, or title-specific tags, such as phantom-menace?
2. How should author tags be used? Should they apply to every work directly written by the author, questions that are actually about the author (e.g. "Does J.K. Rowling deny writing fantasy?")? Something else?
3. Do we want to continue using specific sub-tags such as jedi or hogwarts, and, if so, do they get used in addition to more general tags, or instead of, in cases where the tags are generally redundant?

My hope is that we can get a good, clear policy as an answer here, and then implement it, at which point I'd edit out the "Current Context" section in the hopes this could become a tag FAQ question.

Answer 1

Franchise Tags / Universe Tags.

I think the current system should be made more clear. Tags should "drill downward" from the largest possible catchment to more specific tags with Series tags used to cover an entire canon universe;

For example, a question about a specific lightsaber fight in Phantom Menace should have a star-wars tag as well as a phantom-menace and possibly a lightsaber and jedi tag.

That'll allow people to locate questions about their own interest areas more easily.

Author Tags

I think that "Author" tags are pretty useless and should only be used on those rare occasions where the question is actually asking about the author themselves (for example this)

Sub Tags

Sub tags should be used to reflect specific topics that are likely to have a reasonable level of interest. Any tag that's only had one question "hit" in say, 6 months should be considered for closure or merger.

Answer 2

1. Should franchise tags be used in conjunction with more specific tags that are sub-sets of that franchise, such as sith, or title-specific tags, such as phantom-menace?

Franchise tags should be used for all questions on a franchise. Sub-tags, including tags for specific titles or series, should not be used.

I believe that franchise tags should be used for all questions that fall under that franchise. Sub-set tags should be removed, or made as synonyms of the franchise tag. Same with title-specific tags. Out of over 1000 Star Wars questions, we currently have 66 questions tagged jedi, and that's one of the more popular tags. We have 887 questions tagged star-wars that contain the word "Jedi", but aren't tagged with jedi. This is an excellent example of why these sub-tags don't work.

Individual title tags should also not be used. harry-potter does just fine without half-blooded-prince. Star Wars and even Star Trek can do just fine without those tags, and if you're asking about a specific series within that franchise, try and include it in the title, or, failing that, just mention it in the body.

People interested in questions on Sith, or The Clone Wars, can simply use the search functionality (with or without adding the franchise tag).

Star Trek makes a bit of a better argument for series-specific tags, at least in theory, but in practice it is a failure. At least, that's how I'd describe it when there are currently 391 questions that have the word "original" in them, and are tagged star-trek, but don't have the star-trek-tos tag. Yes, quite a few of them aren't about TOS, but I find it hard to believe most aren't. Certainly many of the top results are clearly referring to the original series.

2 . How should author tags be used? Should they apply to every work directly written by the author, questions that are actually about the author (e.g. "Does J.K. Rowling deny writing fantasy?")? Something else?

Author tags should only be used for questions about the actual author, and not their specific works.

This one is tricky, and I really want to have author tags associated with works from the author. It would be great, for example, to quickly find all questions on the works of Phillip K. Dick, which are numerous and generally unrelated. Search won't work for that, since we can't count on people to say "In the movie version of Phillip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly...".

Unfortunately, it just isn't practical to expect all questions on an author's works to include that author's tag. There are currently 206 out of 374 a-song-of-ice-and-fire questions that don't have george-r-r-martin. 486 out of 697 questions on lord-of-the-rings don't have the tolkien tag.

Story ID questions further complicate this. If there's a question to identify a book, and it winds up being a Phillip K. Dick novel, should the tag be added? Would the OP know to add the tag? Certainly not. Would anyone who does know notice that the tag is ready to be added? Unlikely.

3 . Do we want to continue using specific sub-tags such as jedi or hogwarts, and, if so, do they get used in addition to more general tags, or instead of, in cases where the tags are generally redundant?

No, these sub-tags should not be used at all. Instead, users can search for those keywords.

Again, as nice as it would be to be able to search on the voldemort tag (and with 149 questions currently with that tag, it would seem like it should be possible), it just doesn't work. Even with 149 questions with that tag, there are still 934 Harry Potter questions that discuss Voldemort, but don't have that tag.

Without the addition of enforced tag hierarchies (which seems to be something that won't happen), sub-tags simply don't work, because they aren't used consistently. No matter how useful they seem in theory, in practice, the best they could do is cause people to miss relevant content because only a fraction of people use them as intended.

Answer 3

Sub-tags

I've been thinking for a long time that tags should work like categories in MediaWiki. For example, if I add r2-d2 to a question, then when I click on that tag it should only show me r2-d2 questions. However, if I create r2-d2 to be a sub-tag of star-wars, then when I click on star-wars it should include r2-d2 questions.

This will reduce the redundancy of tags, therefore making tagging easier for all. Eg, someone new to this site may add a sub-tag and they get the appropriate "higher tags" for free.

Note: you could have multiple higher tags. So r2-d2 might be a sub-tag of both star-wars and droids (which in turn is a sub-tag of robots).