Spaces and initialism in tagging styles

Question

I just saw a tag get "corrected" to imply that there's space between the initials of an author who doesn't put spaces between her initials. In fact, neither JK Rowling nor the Tolkien Estate use initial spaces, and neither do most sources referring to them, but we do: j-k-rowling, j-r-r-tolkien (Wikipedia, btw, DOES use initial spacing and seems to be regularly violating their own policy in the process).

English style is, of course, inconsistent on the subject. Any way we choose will be applauded by some style guides and reviled by others. My problem is that a new tag was invented out of the blue and made dominant over an existing one, in order to adhere to a style guide we haven't actually chosen yet.

The way I see it, we've got three basic options:

• Standardise by author's choice and have internally inconsistent tagging practices, or
• Standardise our tagging practices and have tags that don't reflect common reality about how authors' names are written, or
• Stop worrying and learn to love the bomb.

I'm not entirely sanguine about any of these but I'm not sure we need a firm tagging style guide at this point anyway. Thoughts? Suggestions? Please.

Answer 1

We should be consistent within the site.

Whatever we decide in the end, let's do the same thing for all authors. That way, we know immediately how to create a tag for a new author Z. Q. Smith without having to know anything about this specific person and how they cho(o)se to write their name, and even new users can see how such tags should be made by looking at existing precedents.

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Now, what should our consistent policy actually be? To use spaces or not to use them? Well, as our friends at ELU can show us, there's no real consensus among the linguistic/writing community on how to do this: the accepted answer on the linked question advocates using spaces, but the highest-voted answer advocates not using them. So I'm going to go out on a limb and say:

let's use spaces between initials in tags.

Regardless of whether you want to say J.K. Rowling or J. K. Rowling or even JK Rowling when writing in text, the fact remains that the "J" and the "K" represent separate words - let's respect this in the tag name. If we wouldn't use joannekathleen-rowling, let's not use jk-rowling. This is consistent with what's been done so far, at least with all such tags that I've seen.

Answer 2

Consistency for its own sake is a waste of time, yours and ours.

When we say consistency is good, we mean to say, we think being consistent will improve the system in some way. But we can't just leave it at that: we have to elucidate exactly what benefit is conferred. "Consistency" for its own sake confers no benefit. Once we've established that consistency is worthwhile, however, then making everything consistent is definitely useful. Until then, unless some specific benefit to consistency is elucidated, then it doesn't exist for its own sake.

It goes against intuition, a sense of what's right and proper, to say this. But that's all it is: a sense. It's not a metric of actual impact to the site. Making everything consistent for no clear, specific reason doesn't do much more besides give us something to pat ourselves on the back about: "We sure made something consistent today."

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In this case, tags exist because people find them useful. Questions fall under tags because those are the tags people found. Since their efficacy is directly measurable by their frequency of use, we should not assume that one will be universally better than the other. We should instead wait until a clear leader emerges, and synonymize as appropriate.

Later on, if it's clear one practice is superior to the other, we can synonymize and merge as appropriate. Doing that work now or doing it later is still the same amount of work. The tag system is very flexible in this regard.

Answer 3

I'd like to answer about J. K. Rowling specifically.

On the cover of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, American English edition (by Scholastic), she has her name written as "J. K. Rowling". On the British version (Bloomsbury), it's written as "J.K.Rowling" on the cover, probably as a fancy heading, but "J. K. Rowling" inside the book.

It is true that in some contexts, such as on Twitter or her new homepage, she has her name written as "J.K. Rowling" these days. However, this is a website about literature, so we should primarily care about the name her books are published under. Thus, I think the tag for her name should be j-k-rowling. (We can have tag synonyms of course.)

Answer 4

As anyone who knows me will be unsurprised to hear, I suggest that we let tagging practices grow organically and not "fix" tags where syntax style is the only "problem."

Where multiple tags for one author blossom naturally, we naturally want to select one as most right so folks can find all the questions about a particular author. This is simple: we can use synonyms to point toward the most commonly used and/or most author's-choice-like existing tag without inventing extra new tags when the users have already provided some.