## Make [tag:books] and [tag:novel] synonyms. ### 1. There's no separated media tags for movies/films that differentiate them from other works. ### 2. A *minimum* of 71.5% of [tag:books] questions are tagged incorrectly, but I suspect it's really at least 80%. Correctly tagging them all is a waste of effort, because: ### 3. Users are going to continue using [tag:books] the way [tag:novel] is intended, because that's what makes sense for the word. Four years worth of cumulative evidence has shown us that. --- [tag:books] is *supposed* to be for specific the book version of a work that's also a movie. >Use this tag only to differentiate the book from the movie or other media. I think this is a bit of a silly usage, to say it's *only* for that purpose. [tag:movie] and [tag:film] are synonyms. Neither one of them say they're only for differentiating the movie from the book version. *However*, [tag:movie] is often used that way. Outside of [tag:story-identification], the main usage of [tag:movie] is actually to differentiate between the written other versions of the work. Of course, the most glaring issue with [tag:books] is that users don't actually use [tag:books] by the definition anyway: [tag:books] **with 635 questions** Top 9 tags, by question count, used with [tag:books] 1. [tag:story-identification] x454, 71.5% 2. [tag:aliens] x37, 5.8% 3. [tag:novel] x34, 5.4% 4. [tag:young-adult] x32, 5.0% 5. [tag:tolkien] x26, 4.1% 6. [tag:lord-of-the-rings] x24, 3.8% 7. [tag:magic] x18, 2.8% 8. [tag:time-travel] x16, 2.5% 9. [tag:suggested-order] x15, 2.4% Compare to: [tag:novel] **with 528 questions** Top 9 tags, by question count, used with [tag:novel] 1. [tag:story-identification] x430, 81.4% 2. [tag:books] x34, 6.4% 3. [tag:young-adult] x31, 5.9% 4. [tag:aliens] x29, 5.5% 5. [tag:time-travel] x18, 3.4% 6. [tag:magic] x13, 2.5% 7. [tag:post-apocalyptic] x13, 2.5% 8. [tag:spaceship] x11, 2.1% 9. [tag:short-stories] x10, 1.9% As you can see here, the primary usage of [tag:books] is [tag:story-identification], which is not only the "wrong" usage, but the the same primary usage as [tag:novels]. In fact, separately, their number of questions tagged as such is very close to the same, but [tags:books] is actually higher. When two words have a near 50/50 split of when they're chosen for the same purpose, that's an excellent sign of a synonym. After the top single used with it, we see some overlap. [tag:aliens], [tag:time-travel] and [tag:young-adult]. Something to note is that those three tags are primarily used for [tag:story-identification], so they're likely used in questions with 3+ tags, than just [tag:books] or [tag:novel] alone. Even without the [tag:books] wiki definition, it's easy to see that [tag:novel] shouldn't be on [tag:books] list and vice-versa. That's redundant, no matter what. Currently the top-voted policy is: >Novel is always a book, but a book is not always a novel. So I say go with the more inclusive term. Yet, I can see when that makes a reasonable difference to how we tag questions. The times when a book is is *not* a novel is usually when it's a short story or some other media which we already have another tag for. Going back to my executive summary, there's very strong reasons for making the two tags synonyms, but no strong reasons for keeping them separate. The strongest argument for keeping them separate has been completely ignored by the majority of the community. The other reasons, such as my last quote, seem like arguments to create additional tags, for things that aren't novels but *are* books.