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I got thinking about a tag recently relating to the WoD tagging question; and I thought more thinking about Genre Tags might be worth-wild.

Now I am thinking that reviewing what Genre tags are, and what they are for is in order.

We appear to have the 3 top-level speculative fiction genre tags:

We don't have tags for any other genres I've seen

  • Crime/Mystery
  • Military
  • Romance

We also don't have tags for any subgenres:

  • Cyberpunk
  • Urban Fantasy

Can we have tags like Urban-Fantasy? Or should we avoid them, The normal fanstasy tag has strong connotations for medieval European fantasy

I think our Genre tags are at their best when they questions like:

They also show up on Game-recommendation questions, and also decent there.

So are Genre tags good? Subgenre tags?

I wouldn't like to see every WoD/Dresden-Files etc question marked any more than I would like ot see every dnd question tagged , but for things that are system agnostic, like "What kind of monsters/horrors from urban mythology can shapeshift?" it seems decent match for.

What I am looking for here is an answers along the lines of:

  • " is reasonable, when need shows it can/will be created"
  • Or "We should not have subgenre tags, forever subdividing leads only to madness"
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1 Answer 1

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OK guys, time to step back a little. The tagging system here is an emergent folksonomy. It is not meant to be a rigorous top-down taxonomy and has no requirement to be parallel. All it matters is that people can find questions about stuff they're looking for.

I can imagine easily someone wanting to narrow down their query about something to the science fiction domain, just as they might want to narrow it down to the gurps-4e game system, so the tags are valid.

Tags are created as they're needed, so apparently no one has needed genre tags for (every other genre in the world) yet. If someone is making some questions that specifically have to do with urban fantasy as a genre, then I'd expect them to possibly add that as a tag. Not before.

I'm pretty sure we have addressed this before in Meta but I can't find it immediately.

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