Do we want to tag questions by the titles of books (part 2)?

Question

Early in the beta, community member Beastly Gerbil started a meta conversation titled Should we be tagging questions with the names of specific books?. So far, we generally have been tagging questions with book titles, but that has caused several problems, and has the potential to cause problems down the line, including (these are all borrowed from Standback's meta answer on the subject):

1. Awkward abbreviations for tags longer than twenty-five characters.

2. What happens if two books have a similar title. For example, take a look at how many books have the title "Love".

3. Stack Exchange has a feature that lets you favorite tags, which makes it easier to find questions tagged with your favorite tags. Tagging by book title ruins that feature, because there are so many tags that it's inefficient to add all of your favorite books.

So what should we do about title tags? Keep all of them, keep some of them, or keep none of them? I want to have this conversation now, because (a) we now have practical experience with title tags so we know if they're useful, and (b) it is still feasible to remove them as this site only has about eight-hundred questions.

Answer 1

Yes.

Title tags offer a lot more benefit than drawbacks - those include easier navigation, less ambiguity, easier customisation of the site.

• Title tags make navigation a lot easier

Obviously one could search for [author] "title" and it would yield the same result (or even more results). In fact, one could also search for "author" "title" - is there no need for author tags as well then? I could make a case for abolishing author tags too, especially for comics, where the three authors (writer, penciller and inker, 4 if you count the colourist) all may have had the same contribution to the work (see Watchmen and V for Vendetta, or The Sandman).

New users, towards attracting which we are working, are unlikely to know the quirks of the SE search system. Encapsulating search strings in quotes ("title title") may be a known thing, but then how will we differentiate questions about a book from questions that merely mention it?

And what if a book has a generic name like Love (or my favourite, It)? Searching for "love" will yield (I'm sure of it) lots and lots of irrelevant results. Adding an author tag to the search? See above.

Two books of the same name published the same year? Please. Even if this ever happens, and both of those books find their way to this Stack (I bet 100 rep they won't), this is too much of an edge case to take into account when deciding title tags as a whole.

• Following book tags is handier than following author tags

Following is overrated anyways

There are multiple reasons for that, but most important of them is the ability to fine-tune the front page.

• The number of works by one author could make following them uncomfortable

  Following an author tag may be a drag for particularly prolific authors (see Stephen King), who have lots of books which may be in completely different genres. For instance, I like Mike Carey Lucifer, but don't care about his other works. Same goes for Holly Black, who wrote some issues of the new Lucifer - I liked it, but I couldn't care less about her young adult fantasy novels.

• Too many tags to follow?

  Following is overrated, really. It may be useful on a site life SO, where a question is posted every 10 seconds, but here we get 4 questions per day - it should be easy to browse through all of them in some 10 minutes. Following too many tags may be a made up problem as well: how many tags do we have now? How many get added every day? With our growth rate, this issue is hardly a problem now and in the close future.

  I'm not aware of the limitations of the SE question filter system, but I think the issue of using RSS or mail to follow tags is overrated. RSS subscriptions do have a limit on the number of tags, as does the site search. The solution - 2 RSS subscriptions!

  Following a lot of tags? Well, aren't you interested in those works? Would you rather follow few tags but get loads of unrelated questions?

• The ability to hide books you don't like and to avoid spoilers

  What if I want to follow an author one of whose books I have not yet read? I can unfollow the author, but that would still display the book on the front page - with spoilers and all that entails.

  And what if I don't want to see questions about a certain book at all? Not using title tags will make the filtering of front page impossible. Enter spoiler hellfest and those darn questions about 1984 and Lord of Flies.

• The limitations of the tagging system can be circumvented

• With clever omissions, length of a tag is not a problem

  E.g. we can drop some auxiliary words in the middle of a long title - it won't suffer as long as the users see something remotely similar when they begin to type the name.

  In this regard, the problem of adding/not adding "The" in front of a name - the-lord-of-the-rings vs lord-of-the-rings - may be worse, because the tag system won't suggest the latter when one starts to type the former.

  Say, for nausicaa-of-the-valley-of-the-wind I created kaze-no-tani-no-naushika and kaze-no-tani-no-nausicaa, both of which are sometimes used. When a user starts to type naus, guess what they will see in suggested tags? :D

  • With Hamlet's feature request, we may yet have some new developments on the topic of tag length, so it's too early to close this page yet.

• Make up for awkward names with guidance in tag excerpts

  This is what guidance is for, folks! All problems, from hpmor to love-2017 will be solved with an appropriate guidance. If the askers can't follow the guidance, a "good" tag name will not help as well.

  An example of tags for books of the same name would look like

  Use this tag for the book by X written in Y

  and

  Use this tag for the book by M written in N

  which clearly indicated the difference between the two books. The important part would be to set this rule straight from the beginning, and adhere to it in all cases.

  Mind you, I still think this criterion is a nitpick, as, to the best of my knowledge, we still haven't received 2 questions about books with the same name - maybe we could admit that books with the same name are not that common to make a fuss over it?

• How to choose the name of a tag?

Simple - follow your best judgment. If the title has alternative British and American spellings, make them synonyms, and use whatever is the original one. If the title is translated - use an official translation, and set up synonyms for other translations and the original name.

Too long? Clever abbreviations, and common sense. E.g. for a question about The Secret Lost Diary of Admiral Richard E. Byrd and The Phantom of the Poles, my instinct tell me to go for [the-secret-lost-diary], which makes sense and is probably what a new user would begin to type when asking a question about it.

For any kind of misunderstanding, there is always chat and meta, where think tanks can be gathered and tag names decided.

• Creating tags for new works and maintaining them is what we (the community) are there for

A new user can't find a tag for their work and leaves in frustration? Good riddance! A new user uses a generic tag and leaves a comment asking someone to create needed tags? That's the spirit!

I think this may be a nice litmus test for new users, as an indicator of their will to ask a question here. I assume this sort of trouble happens from time to time on Movies & TV, where more experienced users handle it - and this is a good sign to show new users that we care and we're here to help.

It is my personal opinion that no question should be left without attention of at least a few users of the site - there must be something that needs an edit, an up vote, a down vote, or other kind of moderation action.

• The will of community is important - and the community doesn't seem to object to title tags.

Recently I had a proposal to determine the usage for the graphic-novel tag right now, before it becomes a hot mess of wrong tagfests. I was turned down on the grounds that the community has to actually see the tag to establish a pattern.

From what I see, the community has been using the title tags since the beginning of the site, despite the fact that the highest-scoring answer is against them. I don't know about you people, but it seems to me that the community has already decided whether they want title tags or not.
_{Want to change that? Good luck.}

Answer 2

Sometimes, but not often.

I really firmly agree with Mithrandir's post, but I wanted to extend it a bit. I won't rehash the reasons for removing these tags in general as they already do a pretty good job of it.

But I think, as I mentioned​ in a comment on their post, that there's a case to be made for certain book-specific tags.

When a work draws a lot of attention, for one reason or another, people can become pseudo-experts on that book in particular. This can happen for one of many reasons - either the book has a wide enough canon to which the idea of "broad knowledge" even applies (think LotR), or the work is typically heavily studied and/or is in some places a cultural touchstone, like The Odyssey, or The Brothers Karamazov.

These books do benefit from individual tags, for two reasons.

1. Tags for these books are more likely to directly draw in knowledgeable people.
2. These books are also most likely to be filtered by people who either don't like or aren't interested in them, and don't want to see question after question about them.

I fall into (2) for books like 1984 and Brave New World, for example.

This, I think, is a better middle ground: some book title (or series title) tags when the book has a wide canon of content or discussion, and everything else, we can just drop the tags for. It's just clutter. Trim the fat.

Answer 3

Nah.

• Length

  We have run into this problem several times, with tags such as constellation-vital-phen (instead of constellation-of-vital-phenomena, and zen-and-art-of-mc-maint (instead of zen-and-the-art-of-motorcycle-maintenance), and will doubtless run into it again.
  It's not possible to shorten every title like this - nobody will know what tag to use.

• Duplication

  Lots of books have the same title as another. Let's take an example tag, storm. What would this refer to? This book? This book? This one?
  I suggested in the comments that we could add years of publication - e.g. storm-2011. But @Gilles raised some valid points - when would we know to add the year from the start? What if more than one book with the same name gets published in a year? This would also exacerbate issues with the tag length. Also, what about a series? What date would we go by?

• New users

  What happens when a new user comes and tries to ask a question about a book that there's no tag for? Doggone it, I can't ask this because I can't create the tag walk-two-moons without 125 imaginary Internet points! Stupid site! I'm not posting anything here. ...and that's not so good for attracting new users. We should be trying to make the experience as pleasant as possible, for all users.

• Different names

  Some books have more than one name they are referred to by. E.g. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's/Sorcerer's Stone (yeah, I know that's included in harry-potter - it's just an example), or a book that has a different name for different editions. What would we tag it?
  We could set up a synonym, but then how would we decide what the master tag is? Which name takes precedence?

• Other languages

  Let's say that I ask a question about a book that's only available in Hebrew. Good, that helps the variety problem. But uh-oh - how do I tag this? Tags don't support Hebrew characters, there's no official translation of the title in English, and it could be translated different ways. Transliteration? Hah. Transliteration is very subjective - just take a look at all of the different ways things are spelled on Mi Yodeya. One word - שבת - can be transliterated many different ways: Shabbat, Shabat, Shabbos, Sabbath... There are more. Point is, transliteration isn't going to work.

SE also has a tag limit that you run into eventually, although I highly doubt that we'll encounter that any time in the next five years even with title tags.