8

Riddle within a fantasy book about 3 men, one with money, one with might and one with a weapon?

This question was self-answered. While the OP thought they were looking for a story by Terry Pratchett and tagged it thus, it turned out to be something from A Song of Ice and Fire.

In general, we don't retag story ID questions when an answer has been found, but in this case it was already tagged, but wrong (because the OP misremembered where the story came from).

Should we now retag the question?

  1. Should we remove the and tags?
  2. Should we add and related tags?
  • 5
    this is why tagging story-id questions with authors/works shouldn't be done. – phantom42 Sep 2 '15 at 20:16
  • 1
    @phantom42 They tagged it. – SQB Sep 2 '15 at 20:30
  • 2
    This isn't a dupe, because it is special case - the question already had tags, and those tags were incorrect, so it isn't the same thing as the other questions are asking. The linked questions are about whether we should add tags after the question is answered. They have nothing to do with inappropriate tags being attached by the OP at the time he or she is asking the question. – Wad Cheber Sep 4 '15 at 2:01
  • 1
    I agree with @phantom42. Don't put author tags on story-ident questions. I'd argue that story-ident questions don't need any other tag; but at least don't put author tags... YMMV – Möoz Sep 9 '15 at 6:15
  • Although accepted by the OP, I can't find the reference in the book. Can someone help me? I'd like to know how this played out. – ImaginaryEvents Sep 10 '15 at 2:05
6

I vote in this case (the OP mistakenly tagged the question AND the tag was incorrect, as demonstrated by the accepted answer) that we remove the tag and also fix the title.

  • If we believe titles are helpful for finding questions/answers, then incorrect titles are less helpful.
  • There is no relation between Discworld and A Song of Ice and Fire, except both being fantasy worlds with a sometimes cynical world view.
  • If we accept the Discworld tag, why not The Lord of the Rings? Both are works of fantasy, both could have a cynical character telling the story.
-5

I'm not familiar with either of these franchises, so I can't answer the question myself, but here's how I see it:

  • If the two franchises are similar enough that someone else is likely to make the same mistake as this OP did, it makes sense to leave the tags as they are, or at the most, add ASoFaI tags.

  • If there is little or no possibility that someone else will make the same mistake as the OP did, then it would be acceptable to change the tags, and probably even remove any references to Pratchett/Discworld/any titles, locations, characters, etc, associated with this franchise.

  • It probably isn't that important either way. Story ID questions are often duplicated, and site policy is to leave the new question open until/unless both the new question and the old question have accepted answers. The prevalence of Story ID dupes suggests that previous questions about the same story are rarely discovered by the person posting the new question before said question is posted. In other words, it is unlikely that someone who has a Story ID question about ASoFaI will find this question before he or she posts the new question, and it won't make any difference whether we change the tags or not.

As such, we can change the tags if we think that it might be beneficial to do so, or we can leave the tags as is if we think that it might be beneficial to do so. But whatever we do, it probably won't matter anyway, so if we simply ignore it altogether, it probably won't make a difference.

  • How did you get statistics for the number of people who successfully find the answer to their story-id question by searching our old Q&A's?? Is it really dwarfed by the number of users posting duplicate questions because they don't succeed or don't try to find the old answer? – user14111 Sep 3 '15 at 9:17
  • @user14111 - I never said any of that. I simply said that we frequently get dupe Story ID questions. – Wad Cheber Sep 4 '15 at 1:18
  • What you said was, "previous questions about the same story are rarely discovered by the person posting the new question before said question is posted." Can't argue with that. If anything, it's an understatement; I'd bet that the people who post duplicate story-id questions never find the answer to their question in our archives before posting the duplicate question. Why would they post the question after they found the answer? – user14111 Sep 4 '15 at 1:56
  • @user14111 - Ah, I see what you're saying. Yeah, I guess that part of my answer doesn't make much sense. – Wad Cheber Sep 4 '15 at 1:58
  • But I thought (wrongly it seems) that you were trying to imply something else: that people who come to this site looking to identify a story (which has been identified before) will rarely discover it in the archives, so it's not important to make the archives more readable. – user14111 Sep 4 '15 at 1:59
  • I don't know but I like to think that dupes are the tip of the iceberg: for everyone who posts a duplicate question there are ten people who found the answer they were looking for and left without posting anything. – user14111 Sep 4 '15 at 2:02

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