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I just got this old question in my review queue for suggested edits, where Secespitus wanted to add and to the tag list. I agree that is a good addition to the question, but when checked the tag list for , then noticed that only one single question had that tag so far. From that single question, I also noticed that the tag exists, which is shared with four other questions.

As it turned out I rejected the suggested edit as I thought that it was not really a good thing to add when there are essentially no other questions with that tag, but I started to ponder on if that was the correct choice.

Should we have sub tags to to allow users to search for individual weapon types or is that superfluous and not really adding anything useful to the site?

I'm not really sure what my stance is on the matter. I personally don't really mind more specific tags, but seeing that there are quite few tagged with them, I have a hard time seeing that anyone would be specifically interested in following only, e.g., bows but no other weapons.
What are your thoughts on the subject? Should we have it and, if so, should we go through the 402 questions with and add specific tags to all of them?

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  • $\begingroup$ as a side note, in case anyone wonder - I decided to remove warfare from the question as it states "effects of certain circumstances, conditions, or locality changes on war". While a bow for certain will be used in medieval warfare, I do not think that the tag warfare fits in this case. $\endgroup$
    – Mrkvička
    Commented Mar 10, 2017 at 15:33
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    $\begingroup$ In accordance to this meta post and it's answer on removing tags, I've removed all questions from both the bow and sword tags, and should be cleaned up automatically by the script. Note that if we decided to actually have a sword/bows tag, we would have to go through every question on the site to add it to every related question, which is, IMO, a ridiculous notion - if the tag was a good tag/naturally used from the beginning, every question related to swords/bows would already be tagged with it $\endgroup$
    – Aify
    Commented Mar 10, 2017 at 19:20
  • $\begingroup$ Removing all the questions from the two tags only affected 6 questions in total, which makes way more sense than editing potentially hundreds of questions in order to add 2 "sub tags". $\endgroup$
    – Aify
    Commented Mar 10, 2017 at 19:20
  • $\begingroup$ @Aify well, I take it that this settles it, then. That was a swift and nice job, I didn't even have time to come back from the weekend. $\endgroup$
    – Mrkvička
    Commented Mar 13, 2017 at 7:06

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It looks like there are currently over 400 questions. That means if we had, say, four subcategories, they could each get 100 questions. And we have plenty of tags with less questions than that.

The part that I'd be concerned about is where to draw the lines. For instance, say we make a tag. It would follow that we should create a tag too, right? And then a tag, but maybe that's not specific enough, so and and and and so on.

Then, for melee weapons, there's , but also do we need and/or and and and and but not to be confused with and so on?

The best distinction that I think makes sense would be and . But that doesn't cover things like gun swords, or bow swords, or throwing spears, or whatever new idea someone's going to come up with that combines a trebuchet with a butterfly knife.

So, I don't really think subcategories are all that useful. Maybe for popular things like guns and swords, but other than that I think it's a case-by-case basis.

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    $\begingroup$ Agreed. I personally like the suggestion of the melee and projectile weapons categories if we do want to get more specific. In the case of someone trying to combine the two we just add both tags to the question. $\endgroup$
    – James
    Commented Mar 10, 2017 at 19:15
  • $\begingroup$ I agree with most of your post, but weapons by itself is good enough. Searching for keywords inside of weapons should be accurate enough. $\endgroup$
    – Aify
    Commented Mar 10, 2017 at 19:15
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We already have tags for sword, axe and knife. I don't like the idea of fragmenting down too much since you can lose the ability to find related questions.

For example, it is easier to search the weapons tags for the keyword 'sword' than it is to look in the sword tag, but also potentially have to look in some other tags that deal with more than one weapon.

I'm a proponent of generalized tags as big bins, and then using the search tool to narrow down within the bin.

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As my name came up here I want to post an answer about this.

When creating my question (How to realistically create a bow that's also two one-handed swords?) I saw the "swords"-tag, which is why I used it and added an additional "bows"-tag as I thought that would be sort of missing. I wasn't really paying attention to the amount of questions with the "swords"-tag. After that I added the description for both of them.

Personally I would like to be able to look for different weapon-types. When searching for questions that are similar this would have been a great help in this case.

So I would say: Yes, sub-tags for the "weapons"-tag can be useful.

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  • $\begingroup$ Have you had poor results when searching in a tag for a particular word/phrase? For example, this search finds questions tagged weapons that include "sword". $\endgroup$
    – Monica Cellio Mod
    Commented Mar 10, 2017 at 20:39
  • $\begingroup$ @MonicaCellio It's not that I had poor results. I just would have liked to have a tag for this topic as it would have been easier, especially for users who are not familiar with using "advanced search tips". There are over 50 questions that are tagged with "weapons" that contain "sword", but there are some that are not about swords.Tagging would make this easier, though it's not really a problem with this one. And I didn't know all tags should have been already created as Aify said in comment $\endgroup$
    – Secespitus
    Commented Mar 10, 2017 at 21:05
  • $\begingroup$ Thanks. I was just trying to understand your perspective; I wasn't criticizing. Tags are an ever-evolving process on SE, so it's not like we have a "no new tags" rule, but we probably don't want to create a zillion tags with 3 questions each, either. So it's important to have meta conversations like this; thanks for contributing! $\endgroup$
    – Monica Cellio Mod
    Commented Mar 10, 2017 at 21:09
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    $\begingroup$ @MonicaCellio I have a question on this topic: if the creation of tags is something we should better discuss on the Meta-Site wouldn't it be better to have the privilege to create a tag at a later level and replace it with a "suggest new tag"? Currently you only need 300 reputation to single-handedly create a new tag, which is pretty early compared with for example "approve tag wiki edits" at 5.000 reputation or even "create tag synonyms" at 2.500 reputation. $\endgroup$
    – Secespitus
    Commented Mar 11, 2017 at 12:52
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    $\begingroup$ That's a good point, and would be worth raising as its own meta question. In partial answer, one of 10k tools is a list of recently-created tags, but that requires people to know to go look at it, so I'm guessing it doesn't get a lot of use. (I admit that I don't look at it as much as I should, and I'm a moderator!) $\endgroup$
    – Monica Cellio Mod
    Commented Mar 12, 2017 at 1:29
  • $\begingroup$ I hope that you do not consider my post as if I thought you did anything wrong; I would probably have done the same if I were the one tagging and finding the tags available. After this discussion, I do believe that it is better to have more generic tags in general, but that some specialized might be useful. As I see it, too specialized tags will make posts hard to find as they contain too few posts and that users might find it hard to figure out which tag to use (shouldn't be the case for "bows" tho), and if if they do not find and use the specialized tags, then they do not fill their purpose. $\endgroup$
    – Mrkvička
    Commented Mar 13, 2017 at 7:26
  • $\begingroup$ @Mrkvička Don't worry, I just wanted to add my opinion to this topic as my name popped up here. I didn't pay too much attention to tags until now, so I will probably be more careful about their usage from now on. This discussion was very useful for me. Thanks for raising this issue. $\endgroup$
    – Secespitus
    Commented Mar 13, 2017 at 7:54

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