story-identification is our main tag for locating stories. However, book-identification has been recently created and has two questions in it. Can we delete or otherwise merge the second tag?
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2 Answers
Done, merged & synonymized.
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4Not every book identification question is a story identification question. One of the book identification questions was about a work of literary theory. story-identification makes absolutely no sense there.– TsundokuCommented Jun 25, 2018 at 18:04
I think the tag story-identification has been used too enthusiastically, since several questions are not about stories:
- Anthology of literary theory that illustrates each theory by applying it to the same works is definitely not about story identification; the central concern is literary theory.
- Looking for a book (possibly a pair of them) with whimsical illustrations of misheard phrases isn't about stories either; the interest is more "linguistic".
- Complete, single book of Peanuts comics?: Peanuts comics may be story, but a collection is not a story.
- Which Biography of Einstein: one may consider biographies as stories, but the question is "which biography?", i.e. which book. We already know what the story in question is, namely Einstein's biography.
So I would support a separate book-identification tag which would be applied to (at least) the above question. The tag wiki excerpts should make the difference between the tags more explicit.
Update: merging both tags into a new tag named identification would be a bad choice, since identification is a term with a different meaning: the "psychological relationship between the reader of a novel and a character in the book".
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2I wouldn't mind a general "identification" tag, then. But I don't think differentiating the two tags really gains anything--the purpose is one: to identify something the user can't fully remember. Anyone searching through the tags will likely care about all "types" simultaneously. In addition, the Sci-Fi/Fantasy SE, which is the only SE to really implement ID questions successfully, has a single main tag (and includes additional tags to specify medium).– KitkatCommented Jun 25, 2018 at 18:25
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1An "identification" tag would be an unfortunate choice, because that is already a technical term in literature with a totally different meaning. I have added this as an update to my answer.– TsundokuCommented Jun 26, 2018 at 8:23
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@Kitkat Anecdotally, I actually think that among all sites with ID questions, SciFi.SE is the one where separating the tag into multiple different ones might make the most sense. While there's not really much of a difference on Literature.SE, a site that deals with a variety of media in contrast sure has many users who only care about books, or films, or comics,..., not to speak of the inherent difference in the actual questions those media by their nature generate. Commented Jun 27, 2018 at 9:55
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@CahirMawrDyffrynæpCeallach So you think that story-identification is an appropriate tag for each of the examples I listed in my answer? I.e. for questions that aren't about finding a specific story?– TsundokuCommented Jun 27, 2018 at 10:38
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@ChristopheStrobbe I wasn't really talking about this answer, sorry. Commented Jun 27, 2018 at 11:07
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But no, not
story-identification, that would be a really odd name. But I indeed don't see much of a point in separating non-fiction works from fictional works (provided they're both on-topic to begin with) by tag if at the end of the day you're always looking for a book. Commented Jun 27, 2018 at 11:09 -
@Kitkat "Sci-Fi/Fantasy SE, which is the only SE to really implement ID questions successfully" - no it's not. What a strange idea!– Rand al'Thor ModCommented Jun 29, 2018 at 4:42
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1Christophe, perhaps an action that everyone could agree on might be to rename the story-ID tag to book-ID?– Rand al'Thor ModCommented Jun 29, 2018 at 4:47
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@Randal'Thor The problem with that idea is that some identification questions are about poems, and poems usually aren't books.– TsundokuCommented Jun 29, 2018 at 9:52
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@ChristopheStrobbe How about "literature-identification"? I would hope everything that comes to this site could fall under that.– KitkatCommented Jun 29, 2018 at 14:03
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@Kitkat If you must have a single tag instead of splitting them up, I would suggest
work-identification.literature-identifcationruns the risk that someone will come along and shorten it toidentification, because the entire site is about literature, so the first part of the tag will look redundant.– TsundokuCommented Jul 1, 2018 at 18:57