Are we making new tags for duplicate game names hard(er) to use?

Question

There is a current trend of games being released that re-use its original name. For example, Doom. The current method for creating new tags for duplicate game names is to append the release year to the game. Therefore, we have the following tags in my example:

doom - the original
doom-2016 - the recent release.

A user wants to ask a question regarding "Doom". It is very likely that they are referring to the new release. The correct tag is doom-2016. However, there is a chance that the user will select doom because that is the name of the game. The user may not know about this tagging method. The user may not carefully read the tag options as they type "doom" (there may be more "Doom" tags for each game in the series). The question then requires further edits to correct the tag.

I have made edits and accepted suggested edits on such questions in the past. Here are some examples of Doom questions that have been fixed:

• How to quickly toggle the HUD+Weapon in Doom 2016 (without going into Options)
• Doom blue screen of death (BSOD)
• More control for map editing in DOOM?
• What do the different DOOM 4 antialiasing settings do and how do they impact performance relative to each other?
• What launch option do I set to start DOOM 4 straight into multiplayer mode?

Are we making it harder on ourselves and users in general by using this method of tagging?

Please note, I am not referring directly to Doom, but to the general way we tag new releases. Tomb Raider, Battlefront and plenty of other games in recent times have re-used their older names. You can type in years between 2010 and 2016 in the tag search to see other examples. I am confident that this trend of reusing game titles will continue. Here are some examples for other games whereby a tag edit was required because the user had selected the "original" game tag rather than the year suffix version:

• Small black circles with numbers around objective locations in Star Wars Battlefront
• Can my brother and I play on the same PS4 console with two different PS+ accounts?
• How to detach the tow cable?
• What key does "m mouse" refer to?
• How do I reach the smoke beacon in TR:DE?

Answer 1

I do not think altering the old tag name is a good idea, as it's far too much work. As I stated in my comment, it's not as simple as altering the tag name in one place, not unless one is a Stack Exchange employee and has access to the database, but even then, we don't know how tags are created. To change a tag name, it's more or less editing every question with the old tag by making a new tag¹.

While currently, doom only has 24 questions, what happens if this happens with minecraft? Is anyone willing to manually go through all 6,796 and alter every question like that? Is it possible to do this via an automation script, but who's willing to make that?

My suggestion would be to leave tags, as they are where new remakes/re-releases get a new suffix (whether it is the year, had, or a subtitle). Instead, I suggest we update the tag excerpt since users should be using these just to confirm the tag they are using.

With the example of doom, it currently has the year the original game was released. I would suggest appending this, saying something like

a futuristic horror themed first person shooter developed and published by id Software in 1993. for questions about the 2016 game use doom-2016

and also update the tag wikis to include this as well.

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^{1: My basis for this is that I have never seen an option to change a tag name when editing tags myself on Anime and Manga SE, and I have all the privileges a non-mod can have. I also confirmed with one of the community team (JNat) on Maid Cafe.}

Answer 2

There is evidence to suggest the current method is a source of edits that fix questions being incorrectly tagged.

In order to avoid confusion for question askers, we should always append the release year where 2 games have the same tag.

In the example for Doom, we would have:

doom-1993 - for the original release
doom-2016 - for the new (2016) release.

There will be no doom tag, if possible.

This way, new questions for "Doom" will require the user to select the exact version by release year.

Answer 3

Another Method would be to merge tags. however this should be planned ahead of time as the longer you wait the more work you may need to do if you mess up and lets not forget Smith's Law.

Smith's Law: "Murphy was an optimist."

from what i have learned probing JNat on Maid Cafe the Process would involve

1. Merging doom into doom-1993 with the second tag having need to be used once since tags don't exists unless they are used in a question.

2. then all doom-2016 need to be merged into doom which needs to be recreated in another question (since it'll no longer exists after the merge).

this is the same order of operation you would follow with future instances. you have to do this in this order otherwise all the questions for the 2 tags will be in the one tag and you'll have to manually go through editing questions. not good if you accidentally merge minecraft-2048 into minecraft before it's questions are merged into minecraft-2011 and have to go through over the 6000 questions looking for which ones to edit

this method however can only be done by mods and SE Employees unlike the previous method which can be done by anyone with the privilege to edit tag wikis and excerpts

Answer 4

This cropped up for me the other day with this question about Spider-man 2 on Gamecube.

How do I unlock/do a Falling Twirl?

For me, I initially thought it was a question about Spider-man 2 on PS5, due for release in Oct 2023.

I think adding a platform tag would help here, but it brought me to this question because of the potential usage of the same tag for games of the same name on different platforms.

Answer 5

There is evidence to suggest the current method is a source of edits that fix questions being incorrectly tagged.

I am proposing that we convert the original name tag to use the year of release as a suffix, and not the new name tag.

In the example for Doom, we would have:

doom-1993 - for the original release
doom - for the new (2016) release.

doom-2016 - could be synonymous with doom.

This way, new questions that are almost certainly concerning the latest version of the game will require less problems for new(er) users, and therefore less edits by the community to get the tagging right.