@LoganM this will be strictly larger series, like some of the other SE sites do

The meta post was featured for almost a month

@LoganM meta.anime.stackexchange.com/questions/2690/… Here's the meta post in discussion

as Hakase said, it's an experiment at the very least

the over-specifying tags was my concern too, but the community has spoken

and i think it's an okay middle ground

Dinner time o/

It's inspired from other SEs and is a fairly good opinion IMO. You believe that it's a bad decision, but that's your opinion. Since it was a community based decision, I believe that it should be respected

@ToshinouKyouko I saw that meta post, and I assumed that people would rationally conclude that there is no need to change. I guess I was wrong.

Who decides what constitutes a "larger series"? In any case, my opinion is greatly informed by the tag chaos present on "some other SE sites" and the negative effect it has had for certain types of questions there. I would much rather avoid the same here.

On this site, if I want to look for a specific question, 99% of the time it's obvious what the tags are. The rare exceptions are series like Index/Railgun and Dragon Ball/DBGT, which we really should have rolled into a singe tag years ago. And if I want to ask a question, I don't need to know anything about the series or the franchise to figure out what tags to use.

In contrast, on SFF or M&TV, about half the tags seem to be junk/filler, and there's a ton of redundant tags that are each used inconsistently, so that no one ever knows exactly what tags belong where and it's impossible to find individual questions. It's basically total anarchy, whereas we have a very organized system in which every question can be tagged trivially. I can't say I see any benefit to their system myself.

@LoganM Isn't that the opposite of what was decided? I don't know if you've watched the Dragon Ball series yourself, but DB and DB GT should be separate in the least,like it currently is, because the former is canon whereas the latter one isn't.

DB and DBZ is a debatable topic, but I for one stand on the side of them having different tags (like much of the community), because they're long series (DB having ~150 episodes and DBZ having ~360 episodes) which is a long watching time. DBZ is a continuation of DB, yes. But the stories are entirely different. Just like you add tags to your ignored tags tab, this can help people avoid spoilers regarding one, if they've watched the other

@LoganM As Toushinou Kyouko said, this is an experiment. Give it time and we shall know of the result. Every great inventor in history has made mistakes, failed many times. But they didn't give up. There are some decisions you have to make. You can't say whether they are right or wrong until you see the outcome for yourself. And I believe that this tag might make the questions more specific...

And most importantly, it helps users in finding questions related to the topic instead of having to search for a series specific topic among a sea of questions related to the whole franchise.

@AshishGupta Completely false. Dragon Ball GT is 100% canon, officially made.

Even more importantly, canon has literally nothing to do with tagging.

@LoganM Wut. It isn't based on any on Toriyama's works

If you wanted to ask a question about a dragon ball doujin, you'd still tag it dragon-ball even though it's not canon.

@AshishGupta That isn't what canon means. Canon means whatever version the rights-holder says is official, and GT is officially canon.

Also, Toriyama was involved in the production of GT.

And since you mentioned tag chaos, I feel myself compelled to tell you that nothing of that sort will happen here. We have many active users who do their level best to clean up the site and questions. Also, if you are talking about the re-tagging work, the ones who are interested in it can handle it very well.

@LoganM Okay, let me put it another way. What's the disadvantage of having broken up tags? I can see many advantages, but I fail to see any disadvantage. The spam on the home page lasts for a few hours. A day atmost. The work of re-tagging can be done by whoever is interested. Nobody is forcing you to do it.

@AshishGupta I've already said, it makes it impossible to find any questions.

@LoganM How so? If anything, it makes it far easier to find questions. Can you provide an example of what you're trying to say?

Yeah, because a FUNimation voice actor is the person we should be deciding policy based on

Anyway, canon is completely irrelevant. Pokemon doesn't even have a canon (there's many official continuities, but none of them is specifically designated the canonical one), but we can still have a pokemon tag just fine.

@AshishGupta If you want to look for a question about power levels in Dragon Ball, now the only way to find it is to happen to know that power levels are only present in the portion of the Dragon Ball manga between chapters 195 and 519. Hence, it would not be tagged as dragon-ball, but only as dragon-ball-z. Even if your question has nothing to do with the story of Dragon Ball or Z, you'd need to know that to know what the tags should be.

That is, if the person tagging it happens to know this fact; if they don't, it'll have the wrong tags. So for a person searching for the question, you either have to already know this seemingly random fact, or else you have to search all Dragon Ball related tags until you happen to find the right one.

@LoganM Pokemon is fine because there are very few questions on it and many series. Assume that if there were 1,000 questions on Pokemon, would it not be easier if there would have been a tag for different Pokemon series?

@PratyushManocha That hasn't stopped SFF and M&TV from having absolutely terrible tag systems, from which this proposal was apparently directly inspired.

There isn't any series with 1000 questions on it.

The only one close is Naruto, with less than 700, and I haven't yet seen much of a push for that one to split.

@LoganM It isn't random. A "dragon-ball-series" tag is most appropriate for such a question because it's applicable throughout the series. DBZ, DB GT, DB Super. And it still doesn't make it harder to find the question

Because you going through 120 questions in "Dragon-Ball" tag, or going through 50 of each broken up tags, is pretty much the same grunt work

@AshishGupta No, it isn't applicable except for DBZ. That's the only part of the series where power levels are even mentioned.

Except that you have a higher chance of finding it in a series-specific tag since it's mentioned there.

@AshishGupta right, which is exactly the chaos I'm talking about.

Now you have to remember and think about all these bizarre rules every time you just want to search for a question.

And sometimes (even if it's not often) the rules will be wrong, so you'll still have to try the other tags.

@LoganM As for Power levels, I think you'll agree that most users will look for it in the DBZ tag only because that's where it's mentioned most (I agree I can't say that I don't remember it being never used in Dragon Ball like you mention) but it's still easier than finding it in Dragon Ball

I don't think I'd have any clue where to look for it myself, and I'm a rather experienced user. So if I don't know, I can't imagine most users will know.

I mean even if you don't know that it's mentioned in DBZ, you'll check what? DB. DBZ. DB GT atmost. You definitely won't go upto DB Super. Which is still an improvement on having to search for it in a "dragon-ball" tag, which you propose should include all of the mentioned series

to be honest this will only affect a few titles, so it shouldn't be a major issue if we do need to revert this change - it's more work to put it into effect. So lets just see how it pans out

@LoganM If my memory serves me right, the concept of power levels was introduced in DBZ itself. Anyone who watched/read DB would know that it wasn't in that particular series. This does in fact help sort the question more effectively

@PratyushManocha Except that it is in Dragon Ball, because Dragon Ball includes Dragon Ball Z. But our tags don't because they're stupid.

Tags aren't optimized for browsing the full question list. They're optimized for searching, both internally and externally. Having tags as large is best for that.

@AshishGupta You need to now perform tags for DB, DBZ, DBGT, DB Super, DB Series, and maybe others. And most of those searches will have 0 questions, or maybe 1 or 2. It's much better to get all 5 of them in one search and look through that list, than to perform 5 separate searches and get 5 questions.

@LoganM I disagree. I still fail to see any disadvantage. If you can check 150-ish questions to find a particular question you're looking for in a broader tag , you certainly shouldn't mind searching for it separately in 2-3 broken up tags.

@AshishGupta Your failing to see something doesn't make it false.

@LoganM Okay, putting your and my feelings aside. Since this is a community based site, where even the moderators are elected by the community, don't you feel that the collective decision should be respected? You're completely trashing it. Also, you could have laid the same points in the meta discussion as you point out here and we could have seen whether the community agreed or not.

When will you ever look through the full list of questions in a tag? Absolutely never, unless you need to do some cleanup/maintenance, which is a rare use case. What you will do with it is use it in searches when you need to find a particular question. Now the work is increased 5-fold in doing that search. And for what, to break up results that were already paginated?

What Ashish just said is true. If one is willing to go through all of the questions to find one particular answer, then he is more than willing to look through the tags and can create the same if he doesn't find one. This will be more efficient and time saving.

@AshishGupta I feel the reasonable policy I laid out years ago on meta which achieved much greater community consensus then should have been given some thought. Instead, it seems that the community here didn't even bother to consider what had already been written on the topic years ago and is still valid today.

@LoganM Okay, point taken. It may inconvenience users who have watched all of the series concerned. But the thing is most haven't. Like in the case of FMA, FMA-Brotherhood.

People mostly watch the latter or the former with very few having watched both. I belong to the latter.

Okay, so for FMA, how do I tag a question about the manga specifically in this new system?

After all, the manga, not either anime, is the canonical version

So I can say the same thing as you did. Why should I have to go through all the questions in the broader tag when I know that my question is from a particular part

but now there is no tag for that. There's a tag for fma-brotherhood, a tag for fma-2003, and a tag for the series.

@LoganM Isn't that what the "tag-guidance usage" is for? To help us decide which tag is appropriate?

there is an overall tag you can use

I'm sure that the appropriate tag will mention that all the manga related questions are to be entered in it

Well, yes, but it ignores a rather huge use case completely.

what can i cook with no ingredients

@ToshinouKyouko yes, so now, at minimum, you'll always need to check the overall tag and the specific tag. That's 2 searches, whereas before you could do one search and get only occasional noise posts.

@LoganM Why would you need to check both the tags? One will have manga, one won't.

@AshishGupta That's a false equivalence. The vast majority of questions specific to FMA 2003/Brotherhood include that in their title and body. You can put that in the search easily, or just do it without that, and as I've said before you'll only occasionally get inapplicable posts which are easy to ignore.

If anything, it made it easier for you to find the post you were searching for. Less "noise posts".

@AshishGupta Why would either tag cover the manga? The manga is just Fullmetal Alchemist, not Fullmetal Alchemist 2003 or Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood.

@LoganM They include it in their title/body because they have to. There is no tag currently to differentiate between the two so one has to specify which series they're talking about.

individual cases can be refined on meta if they need to

@LoganM Not those. The series tag.

ah, I found some lentils

dinner sorted

@LoganM You also mentioned that there are no tags having 1000 questions. That was only an example. Consider Naruto for instance. It has 400-500 questions currently if I'm not wrong, and is the second top tag. It currently doesn't differentiate between Naruto and Naruto Shippuuden.

@AshishGupta and why would it? There's only one Naruto manga.

If you've watched both, you pretty much know the difference between the two and there's a huge story difference. If one wants to search for a particular post regarding Shippuuden anime, he/she has to go through the others as well.

I have watched neither and don't intend to do so. To be honest I don't care about Naruto or FMA or DB.

@LoganM You repeatedly keep mentioning manga. Manga questions will be handled with in the "series" tag as per the current suggestion, if I'm not wrong, which makes it easier for you to search for a manga related question as well.

@LoganM For that matter, why would someone want to ask a question from SnK: Before The Fall in SnK? Won't it be useless for a person looking for only SnK questions?

But the day we split Aqua off aria (or worse, split it into animation, natural, and origination) is the day I leave this site for good.

@LoganM It won't, as per the current suggestion. That's the thing. Those are small series, not requiring splitting.

I think it's clear that neither of you is going to read what I actually wrote, as I've already explained myself many times above and answered both of those questions. So I'm not going to debate this any further.

@LoganM I read all of what you wrote. Just like you disagree with my arguments, I disagree with yours. Anyway, to each his own. You're entitled to your opinion.

@ToshinouKyouko The chaos of having to determine each tag individually on meta, and having the rules applied about as well as any other policy we determine on meta, is exactly what I want to avoid. Having written almost half of everything on meta by character count, I can say that no one actually follows what's on meta.

But whatever, I'm willing to sacrifice Dragon Ball and FMA if it provides a good example for the rest of the site to avoid.

You can say a lot with few words. As part of my policy-review campaign I hope that it will make meta a much clearer place, making it easier for users to follow.

A&M of course has its issues, but experiments not tried are failed experiments. And we will get nowhere without trying new things

It's lentils time so I'm signing off

You can say a lot, but few users will read it, fewer will understand it, and even fewer will remember. And even the ones that do will only apply it when they feel like it.

Any time we can make policy simpler so that we don't have to use meta, that's a win. And this new tagging policy does the opposite.

Anyway I need to head out as well.

@Taisho lewd

a lot of talk for something so insignificant

let's just let this experiment run for a while and see

this reminded me of the infinite talking about IDs

I'm surprised we don't have so many best girl arguments

I've talked about them myself but nothing I said could help a lot, so I'll refrain this time

I think we've settled to each have our own standards of girl bestness

I wish we could have a main "existing real problems" directory post on meta coz a lot of those posts are resolved or are obsolete

that would increase meta's usability infinitely

or maybe some kind of way to differentiate between importance of problems

like give users ability to vote on the degrees of importance

simultaneously it would be a poll

question votes are really only good for main site to determine the overall quality of a question, but meta is not the main site

does anyone have any thoughts on that?

@ʞɹɐzǝɹ @MadaraUchiha (just 2 messages up)

I think it's a problem that the only people who know well enough what's going on on meta are those who have been looking at all the posts there

in my vision there should be a diagram that shows other related problems within various areas of the site, but that's probably never going to be implemented

the links are there sometimes, they show up in the sidebar, but you have to read everything and look for non-linked posts to get the full idea, and it could be improved, I think

this has got to be solved somewhere somehow already

@Hakase we had a review thing which I am slowly going through meta.anime.stackexchange.com/questions/2564/…

It would be good if we could have a continually up-to-date one though

There's still a few things to go anyway, then maybe we can do another

or there are some other options, which myself, mad and krazr are having super-secret chats about

but idk if anything will come of that

the best analogy I can come up with is Visual Studio's architecture diagram which shows every member of a solution, every connection, and non-connected elements on the side, so you could have the best understanding what is related to what, and what has not been connected to anything yet (useless meta posts or non-problems where users just want to know how something works)

if only one could somehow parse all meta posts into such a diagram, it would be a cool thing to look at

what do you think of that?

It would be interesting anyway

I'm a visual guy, I'll know it when I see it, so I'd very much like to see it

I usually find those things overwhelming

if you filter out support questions, it's gonna be great

tags that are already there can help categorize posts by type

anyone watched the Kantai Collection anime here?

@matt probably

@ToshinouKyouko I've long since given up on anyone on the internet's ability to determine best girls.

@LoganM I don't think that is bad though, if the same rules applied to real life you wouldn't want everyone fanboying over your wife all thetime...

@Hakase this is a significant issue that should have a better platform. I'll try making a similar post to meta.anime.stackexchange.com/questions/2564/… this weekend for ppl to address their concerns