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How can you tell you’re using a meta-tag? It’s easier than you might think.

 

1. If the tag can’t work as the only tag on a question, it’s probably a meta-tag. Every tag you use should be able to work, more or less, as the only tag on a question. Meta-tags, like [beginner], [subjective], and [best-practices], are useless by themselves — they tell you nothing at all about the content of the question.

2. If the tag commonly means different things to different people, it’s probably a meta-tag. In a cruel, ironic twist, the meaning of the tag [subjective] itself … is actually subjective. Ditto for [best-practices] and [beginner]. Best practices to whom? Beginner by what criteria? These tags are impossible to define by anything remotely resembling an objective metric. In comparison, the the meaning of tags like [java], [c#], and [javascript] are crystal clear to all but the nuttiest of nutbags.

How can you tell you’re using a meta-tag? It’s easier than you might think.

1. If the tag can’t work as the only tag on a question, it’s probably a meta-tag. Every tag you use should be able to work, more or less, as the only tag on a question. Meta-tags, like [beginner], [subjective], and [best-practices], are useless by themselves — they tell you nothing at all about the content of the question.

2. If the tag commonly means different things to different people, it’s probably a meta-tag. In a cruel, ironic twist, the meaning of the tag [subjective] itself … is actually subjective. Ditto for [best-practices] and [beginner]. Best practices to whom? Beginner by what criteria? These tags are impossible to define by anything remotely resembling an objective metric. In comparison, the the meaning of tags like [java], [c#], and [javascript] are crystal clear to all but the nuttiest of nutbags.

• It can work as the only tag on a question beside a system tag, which makes it pass the only-tag test for RPG.SE: Is the Only-Tag Test for meta-tag-ness broken here?

• It definitely means things to different people. You probably saw that coming. Every time we've discussed how to use the tag, or even what RAW means, we've had many responses, all of them slightly different.

• It can work as the only tag on a question beside a system tag, which makes it pass the only-tag test for RPG.SE: Is the Only-Tag Test for meta-tag-ness broken here?

• It definitely means different things to different people. You probably saw that coming. Every time we've discussed how to use the tag, or even what RAW means, we've had many responses, all of them slightly different.

Besides: since lots of ordinary rules questions technically fit into the umbrella of rules as written by virtue of just being answerable with the rules themselves, but were never tagged [rules-as-written] because we tag for question content and not for answers, the tag was never useful for finding all rules as written questions and answers. It just found some of them.

The Death of Meta Tags tells us that meta-tags are tags which describe something other than the content of the question. There are two primary indicators:

Instead, people can/should just describe their constraints as they currently do. Those constraints might be “no Sage Advice”, “no dev tweets”, “not interested in personal interpretations”, or many other things or a combination thereof. We'll respect those constraints like we always do, and we don't need to find some unified definition of “rules as written” to do that.

(Much later, we also at least settled on back to tagging basics which was super helpful for our processes. It resolved some of our problems and also, I think, put others into clearer relief.)

Besides: since lots of ordinary rules questions technically fit into the umbrella of rules as written by virtue of just being answerable with the rules themselves, but were never tagged [rules-as-written] because we tag for question content and not for answers, the tag was never useful for finding all rules as written questions and answers. It just found some of them.

The Death of Meta Tags tells us that meta-tags are tags which describe something other than the content of the question. There are two additional primary indicators:

Instead, people can/should just describe their constraints as they currently do. Those constraints might be “no Unearthed Arcana”, “not interested in personal interpretations”, “just core books, no adventure material please”, or many other things or a combination thereof. We'll respect those constraints like we always do, and we don't need to find some unified definition of “rules as written” to do that.