What should our simple test be for character tags?

Question

Based on the recent, upvoted answer to the old character tag question:

Why is there a voldemort tag? Is there a criterion for character tags?

If suggest reading the full post for background information, and some of the other, many discussions on character tagging.

If it takes an acrimonious discussion for every tag to establish whether or not it's appropriate, the test you're using is broken. You're letting the perfect become the enemy of the good... Find a simpler test, one that folks can apply in common cases (release of a new book / movie) without having to tear each others' throats out here on meta.

This statement is made because our currently policy is fairly unclear. It uses terms such as "lots of questions", "significant fraction", "do you think", which lend themselves towards subjectivity, and the arguments we have.

@Shog9 clarified further in his comments:

Tags are a utilitarian form of organization, @Aith; they're messy by design. We have some rules in place to help avoid complete chaos, but utility should always take precedence over organizational ideals that can't easily be achieved in practice. This is my problem with the status quo: folks are apparently wasting more time arguing about which tags are unnecessary than they are on adding those which are useful.
...
A folksonomy is only useful if the meaning of a tag emerges based on how it's used; you can't assign a meaning other than what emerges naturally... and if none emerges, you can't force it to. As with language itself, you have to be willing to examine how people use it to understand what they're saying.

Based on that last part, I would think it could be a good idea to design the test around how people actually use tags, or want to use them, if possible.

I'm not aiming for this to be a discussion about whether or not we should have a new simple test. I'm aiming to see what types of solutions we can come up with towards our problem. Perhaps later we can vote as to whether/when to implement a suggested change. Let's play it hypothetical and constructive to start, and see where that gets us.

So, what should our new, simple test be for character tags, which can be easily applied in our common cases?

Answer 1

I don't see the need to ever have tags about specific characters.

The name of the character should be used in the question anyway, so it's still easily searchable. If the name isn't included (outside of spoiler text - I don't know if that part is looked at for search results), then it's either a very badly written question or it's attempting not to spoil anything - at which point adding a character tag is just as much of a spoiler as using their name. Asking "When was it decided that this character was the father of this other character?" isn't any less a spoiler if you then throw darth-vader and luke-skywalker tags on it.

It just strikes me as a bit too much unnecessary categorisation. If the only reason to have the tag is because the character has been mentioned, it doesn't need to exist at all. At that point you're tagging just for the sake of tagging, and there's no actual gain in terms of functionality to users.

Disallowing character tags means that:

• there's no disagreement on whether a specific character warrants a tag, the answer is always "no"
• there's no confusion on when a character tag should be created, the answer is always "never"

If we absolutely need a test, then I'd propose this:

10 or more users - who don't already have the accompanying franchise/series/movie/whatever tag favourited - have expressed a desire to add the tag as one of their favourites, because they consider themselves an expert on and/or especially interested in that character in particular, but not the rest of the work.

That's the only time the tag actually adds functionality to the site that can't otherwise be achieved. By design I can't see that being a test that is ever passed, though.

Answer 2

I'm posting Shog9's suggestion as an answer, since it was given already in the other thread:

If at least 10 questions have been asked regarding a character, create a tag for that character and add it to those questions.

Answer 3

Just to provide some possibly useful raw data for this question I read through the first 10 pages of star-wars questions (oldest first, so I haven't even gotten to The Force Awakens yet) to see what characters were in them. If this seems like a reasonable set of tags for a single (admittedly large and expansive) universe, then the offically-dubbed Shog9-rule would probably work. If not, it may need some tweaking.

If we use the arbitrary suggestion of "10 questions" as a starting point, we need the following tags:

• count-dooku - 10
• padme-amidala - 11
• qui-gon-jin - 11
• leia-organa - 12
• c-3po - 13
• han-solo - 16
• yoda - 21
• anakin-skywalker - 33

(I kept Anakin separate because he really is a different character in the prequels vs. original trilogy, and many questions were asked where that distinction was relevant, or even part of the question.)

Also, since that was only about 1/5 of the questions, there's a statistically good chance we'll also need (these are tags with 4 or more questions in the first 10 pages, obviously not all of these will actually hit 10)

• r2-d2 - 9
• shmi-skywalker - 8
• darth-maul - 6
• jabba-the-hutt - 6
• boba-fett - 5
• jar-jar-binks - 4
• mace-windu - 4
• chewbacca - 4
• sifo-dyas - 4
• general-grevious - 4

Finally, darth-sidious, obi-wan-kenobi, luke-skywalker and darth-vader already exist, and have 30+ questions, but they are used very erratically (I didn't even realize some of them existed for several pages). Obviously, once we have a character-tag rule in place a massive retagging effort will need to follow.

There are also a lot of questions about palpatine, which could probably be made into a synonym of darth-sidious, though IMO that's a moderate spoiler for anyone who hasn't seen the prequels yet.

Answer 4

In response to CreationEdge's request:

Based on that last part, I would think it could be a good idea to design the test around how people actually use tags, or want to use them, if possible.

I would like to give my answer which can partially be found in the conversation that Shog9 and I had in the previous thread:

"tags are a utilitarian form of organization... but messy by design"

Organization and quicker identification and sorting - in other words, fully utilitarian - is how I always personally understood the purpose of tagging systems across various platforms - blogging, forums, offline data management, etc - and it is with this understanding that I myself utilize tags.

In other words, probably less of 'folksonomy' which Shog9 linked to and more of 'taxonomy' with logical hierarchies and connections with close to zero personal investment towards 'tags' created or not created no matter how social the setting is.

That said, I would rather go for a 'label them all individually' or 'label every character-related question with a generic 'character' tag' and be done with it because I see that though '10 topics' makes ideal sense in theory... it will be a different story in practice.

Differing opinions can be great, but not when they result in recurrent hamster wheeling (my opinion) and as recurrent discussions on character tagging have shown, people STILL will find reason to argue that a character ought to have a tag because of ABC and 123 situation.

Additionally, I have to agree that eventually, even the most minor characters will accumulate enough questions to hit the '10 questions' threshold.

And finally, though veterans to Stack Exchange and to the SF section in particular might think '10 questions' makes sense, I don't think newbies are going to think the same way.

To demonstrate: A new person sees various questions related to various characters and sees them all tagged with the appropriate character names. "Cool, that makes sense," they think.

When they see another question about another character that isn't tagged with the character's name, they go, "Oh hey, this character question ought to be tagged, too, since everyone else was... right? Right."

In such a case, the assumption made may not be correct which will inevitably result in tag creation conflicts and yet, how can we blame them for making that assumption in the first place unless there's some sort of prompt to remind them and tell them that, "Hey, you, character tagging doesn't apply to ABC person because they aren't popular enough... yet."

If we're actually interested in keeping the chaos of tagging down to a minimum, then my opinion is that the most utilitarian approach is the most logical.

Either tag everyone... or tag no one... or tag every character with a generic 'character' tag.

Answer 5

I found another suggestion, which isn't my own:

Any tag should be able to pass the "more than 2 questions will exist in a 6 month period" test, and the "will another human being actually subscribe to this tag?" test.