What is our approach to specialized tags?

Question

Down in the last few pages of the tags list we have a bunch of tags that have only been used once. Some will almost certainly increase over time (e.g. assorted minor prophets and hermeneutical principles), but others seem like one-shots (e.g. hades, bookend, nomadism).

Should we leave them alone -- the site is young and any of these could take off? Should we try to normalize them now, while the number of affected questions is small? Is there no overall philosophy and we should just ask about them on a case-by-case basis?

Answer 1

Just thinking out loud because I still don't know how tagging ought to work. (To me, StackExchange is just a fancy USENET. ;-)

Soldarnal's answer seems right to me. We need to focus on a tagging system that is optimized for finding questions and answers. When I starting thinking that way, I had a sudden insight:

Tags are observations.

They should be things that are painfully obvious to an expert in the field. Most sites, the tag is about the question. So my question at Judaism.SE was (apparently) about history tanach mitzvah derech-eretz-manners rebuke-tochacha. Once I looked them up, I agree: that was what my question was about. I didn't need to know the answer to see they were correct, I just needed to understand the tags and know what I had asked. (This is why tag wikis are critical. I had to Google two of the tags to find out what they meant. As a gentile, I just don't know the lingo.)

On Biblical Hermeneutics, the observations should be about the text, if that's what a question is about. That's why the vast majority of our tags are books of the Bible: the easiest observation to make is "where is the text from". Anyone can see that this sort of tag fits.

(There are a smaller number of questions that are about hermeneutics. These almost always carry hermeneutical-approaches and not a book tag. In these cases, our tags are about the question, just like anywhere else.)

Tags signal the desired type of answer

Just like c++ or catholic, we have tags that signal what type of answer the poster is hoping to receive. Oddly, tanakh has become one. Others are authorship, source-criticism, and (sometimes) textual-criticism. While you might be able to glean from the question that this is what is being asked, the tag makes extra sure. After the question has a good set of answers, these tags will be observations about the answers. These types of tags are somewhat less useful than the first since they limit the range of answers (often needlessly). Not being careful here can sink us into the meta-tag trap.

Tag should not be interpretations

I think this is where things get uncomfortable: what does it mean that I tag a question with inspired? It's not really an observation about the text (at least not an obvious on) and it's not really a signal to the type of answer being requested. It's more like one possible answer. I think these types of tags should be strongly discouraged.

Tags are by experts and for experts

We shouldn't shy away from using tags that require more expert observations. A question on Leviticus 19:17-18 or Matthew 18:15 is about reconciliation even though neither passage uses the word. Yes, it's also an interpretation, but it's really obvious to anyone familiar with the commentaries on these passages. If I want to find all the questions about reconciliation, I should be able to do that. This afternoon, someone asked be about a question on "biblical contradictions". It would be nice if I could have pointed him to contradictions.

One-shot tags

I don't think we have quite enough questions to know if our single-use tags are going to be one-shot. septuagint has one question and lxx has another. I expect that these will be bigger tags in the future. nomadism probably won't be. But who knows? We have three deborah questions and I couldn't imagine there ever being more than one. I would probably leave them for now.

Answer 2

I understand why everyone is afraid of the site becoming doctrine-driven; but the fact remains that the Bible is a theological text. So I would expect tags that reflect theological themes like temple, theodicy, or eschatology. This is how the field works; people study, for instance, ethics in John and then maybe criticize him for being too in-group focused compared to the Synoptic authors. If there were a similar site about, say, Plato's writings; the tagging system would have pretty limited utility if they only allowed tags like crito, phaedo, and the-republic but not metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics.

So, I think we really hurt the value of the site as a tool if we start ham-handedly removing the "idea tags". I imagine someone comes to the site and, for instance, they want to learn: What are the big questions regarding the use of the law in the new-testament? Or what questions have people wrestled with in understanding justification within pauline thought. This is exactly how I've used the tags on StackOverflow. I was handed an asp.net-mvc-3 project, and having never worked with the platform before I went to that tag and surveyed the top questions to get a sense of what are the most common issues there.

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In respect to the three tags that were originally asked about here, hades can probably be replaced with eschatology. I think inclusio is of somewhat doubtful value; once someone understands the function of an inclusio (or chaism), it pretty much functions everywhere the same, and anyone looking for a list of inclusios would be better served somewhere else (or could perhaps just ask that as a question). I don't necessarily have a problem with nomadism. I don't think it will get a lot of questions, but it certainly exists a theme, so I don't see any reason to get rid of it unless there is a better word or unless it could be subsumed under a different tag.

Answer 3

I changed bookend to inclusio as that is the technical term. Generally speaking given the expert focus we are aiming for, I think we want to encourage tagging on technical terms used in the fields of hermeneutics and exegesis.

OTOH I think there would have to be a strong reason to allow any tag that is explicitly about a doctrine - I propose that we strip 'doctrine' (ie 'idea'/'concept') tags by default unless they are on a list we agree here on meta (I can't off-hand think of any we'd want but there may be some). This would certainly mean removing hades and nomadism