Tagging standards ain't standard - they're confusing

Question

To illustrate and explain my source of confusion, I present you two opposing examples.

Example 1 - less tags

I recently asked this question. Because I play Skyrim on the PC and was expecting the answer to be a console command (until I figured out the answer was to just wait the problem out) I tagged with pc. I have no idea if this particular bug happens on other platforms. As you can see, the PC tag was removed - I added it back, and it was removed again, with the comment

unless you can show that it's a pc-only problem it doesn't get the pc tag

I shrugged and mentally filed away this information since I couldn't find any indication that this was the case or any kind of proof to cite. If the bug happens on the console versions then sure, this Q/A might be useful to them, seems fine to me.

Example 2 - more tags

I know that the purpose of tags is mainly to allow easier filtering and searching within the site. So, when I came across this question I figured that following the assumption "not all questions about minecraft-feed-the-beast are relevant to minecraft" the question didn't need the Minecraft tag. Someone interested in vanilla Minecraft may not necessarily be interested in FTB questions. As you can see from the revision history, not everyone agreed with this, and it emerges that:

site policy is that the tag for the base game is included when the question is about mods for a game

In fact, my tagging changes are mentioned in the comments of that question:

Checking the feed-the-beast tag, it looks like a particular user has been rolling back my edits to include that tag, so perhaps a reminder of this policy would be in order. Ha. – Raven Dreamer♦ 4 hours ago

It's not like I've been systematically rolling back edits, but I have removed the Minecraft tag a few times. Often I don't check the revision history before editing when it seems (at least to me) to be a cut-and-dried change. I've also removed parent tags from some Skyrim questions, where the skyrim-dawnguard (or other expansion tag) has been used in relation to content about that expansion.

What's the problem?

In my eyes, these policies are at odds with each other. The vast majority of Skyrim bugs are probably cross-platform so sure, by all means get rid of the PC tag from a Skyrim bug question. Conversely, the vast majority of FTB questions are not going to be relevant to vanilla Minecraft, so why not follow this same procedure?

Also, I like to consider myself a 'good' use of the site. I've read a lot of past meta content in order to familiarise myself with what to do/not to do, especially when it comes to stuff that's less than intuitive (tagging and allowable questions especially), and I've never come across the policy of questions about expansion content having a tag for the base game. I actually thought that the opposite was true - anything tagged with minecraft-feed-the-beast is already obviously about Minecraft, therefore the Minecraft tag is unnecessary.

So, what I feel needs to be made much clearer is the site's tagging policy. As is clear, trawling through the meta looking for the relevant/important posts leads to an incomplete or even incorrect grasp on the policies.

What is the sites tagging policy and the main rules/exceptions to be aware of? What are the best/important meta posts to read on tagging? Is there a way to consolidate this information so others don't make the same mistakes I have been unknowingly making?

I thought I was helping - this was clearly not the case, so certainly some stuff needs to be clarified.

Answer 1

Actually if you look about it this way you'll see the policy is consistent:

 game tag    +   auxiliary tags
 (always!)      (when helpful)

 [skyrim]    +       [pc]
[minecraft]  +  [feed-the-beast]

In the first question, the tag wasn't helpful, so it was removed. In the second, it was helpful, so it gets to stay.

---

Why keep the minecraft tag? There is no hierarchy in the tag system. [minecraft-feed-the-beast] is not some kind of [minecraft] subtag. Removing [minecraft] makes it so that the question:

• wouldn't appear on the list of minecraft questions
• wouldn't count towards your progress for minecraft tag badges

Also, we can't do this through prefixes in general:

• we can't always handle "tag hierarchy" through prefixes; see our Elder Scrolls tags.
• it doesn't make sense for votes to "transfer" between different games (why would your [portal-2] questions count towards [portal]?)

Answer 2

Ultimately, a lot of this comes down to the main purposes tags exist for: favouriting, ignoring, and watching them. If someone plays Minecraft constantly, using various mods and mod packs, and is overall extremely knowledgeable about Minecraft in general, which seems like the better solution:

• All Minecraft questions, regardless of mods, have a single tag they can favorite.
• Every major mod has its own tag, meaning they have to not only favorite each one separately, they also need to keep a close eye on the list of tags if they want to spot new mods getting tags.

Similarly, if someone hates Minecraft, and wants to avoid ever seeing anything having to do with it, does it make more sense to have one master tag they can ignore, or to have them keep ignoring every individual mod?

This reasoning applies to the platform tags, too. As a Skyrim player whose only gaming systems are a Wii and a PC, I like that I can favourite the Skyrim tag, ignore the Xbox 360 and PS3 tags, and this lets me easily spot Skyrim issues that are not specific to the systems I don't own.

If the system tags were applied to every question, not just ones that are specific to that platform, then favouriting and ignoring them becomes meaningless.

Answer 3

The major problem here is the old one of tag hierarchy. The powers that be once upon a time decided that all tags are equal, and yet even on grandmother StackOverflow there exist hierarchies in tags, e.g. specific versions of development environments VS the environments in general. Both the arguments for and against implementing such an hierarchy make sense, which is why so far nothing has changed.

Your example minecraft-feed-the-beast is very exemplary of this issue. Yes, FTB is a minecraft mod, but should someone interested only on vanilla (or another mod, e.g. minecraft-hexxit), why should their browsing the minecraft tag show FTB questions they potentially cannot answer nor will benefit from due to the non-vanilla features? Yet on the other hand, FTB is a minecraft mod, so that connection should be indicated. Once upon a time I made a feature request for an implicit tagging hierarchy, hoping that in your example one would usually use only the minecraft-feed-the-beast tag and the question would implicitly be tagged minecraft without using up a tag slot and maybe only show up in minecraft queries when an "include implcitly tagged questions" option is active. For FTB one could sure enough simply use tag-wildcards, e.g. [tag:minecraft*] (note how this fails to become a tag link...), but as an example closer to your first example pc, take a game that only exists on ps3, a tag which I ignore. Should I have to add every PS3-exclusive game to my ignore list?

And on the other hand, when a game has e.g. both a pc version and a ps3 one, someone might tag their question ps3 due to unexpected behaviour that may be related to the console - but it could also be the same on pc, so now if the game implicitly were tagged pc that question could still turn out to be interesting to me since maybe the actual issue is cross-platform.