Question about dealing with multiple relevant tags

Question

I've spent some time trolling through the tag system (been bored) and updating any blank entries I might be a fan of. Found myself eyeing the Mistborn section and trying to presume "how it should be working" with the author tag, the series tag, the subseries tag, etc.... led me to search and find this question, which seems to be the most recent and more comprehensive at documenting multiple tag issues.

Unfortunately that question didn't seem to lead to any sort of consensus. There are two differing answers, each with the same upvote count, one that looks like its advocating a barebones one-tag approach and the other advocating tags and sub-tags (at most, limiting author tags). Everything else I see about tags appears to be a lot of single-use questions asking if something should be removed.

I would like to continue helping make the tag system useful where I can (or at least somewhat, as I think "close enough" is best that can be hoped categorizing for a fanbase as varied and opinionated as most SFF fans are). Since I can see the reasoning behind both approaches, my general takeaway from the non-consensus seems to be "keep it simple stupid by default, unless you see the demand is there for more". Applying this to the Mistborn examples wouldn't lead to much changing (all the tags are well in use), but might guide some cleanup (mistborn tag clarified to apply to entire setting, subseries tags removed from questions that aren't novel specific, maybe clarifying the subseries tags (wax-wayne-novels is an awful name) etc.)

tl;dr hierarchy seems unavoidable in the long run, but the more we can trim and clarify the better. Is this the best approach?

Answer 1

Those tags are partly my doing, I believe, and I'm not happy with them either.

The Mistborn setting is a bit of a problem to tag because Mistborn is the name of the setting, and the general name for the first trilogy, and the name of the first novel. I think "Wax and Wayne" is the name of the second series, so perhaps we can trim the "-novels" off the tag, but it still sucks.

The author's tag probably shouldn't be used for a book that has a more specific tag; there's also a cosmere tag to cover things that cross more than one novel, so the sanderson tag probably only applies to one-off books outside the Cosmere.

Otherwise, I don't think we're going to get any generally useful rules out of trying to figure out the tag situation for the Mistborn books, but god bless you for trying :)