Is this a good or a bad example of changing tags?

Question

On this question's revisions you can see that the tags were changed twice. The first time "system-recommendation" was added even though the question didn't ask about a system, and stated the system in another tag. The second time that was removed and campaign-setting was also removed and adventure added.

I think campaign-setting was appropriate for this question because, considering it came from the original poster, it implies that they was willing to pick the campaign's setting based on what material they could find.

Further, neither adventure nor campaign-setting have any description about what they are to distinguish them apart. I like when people edit a post to add something obvious (Like the poster says they're playing in D&D 3.5e but forgets to tag it) but this seems to be simple opinion of how someone else would tag it turning into something enforced.

Is retagging in this way something that is encouraged on the RPG Stack Exchange?

Answer 1

1. Retagging is good and encouraged, per @waxeagle.

2. "Shopping" questions are allowed here - I see no reason to allow system-rec but not adventure-rec. Waxy's speaking a bit out of turn there. For shopping/recommendation questions, we only have system-rec, which we could I guess rename to product-rec or game-rec or shopping. I actually added the system-rec tag to that question to indicate people should be abiding by the rules we use for system-rec questions. It's the one we have, so the one we should use. If anyone wants to push through the complaining to propose a constructive change we can do that of course.

As for the specific tags in this case - he is asking for a "campaign," which in RPG parlance is a series of adventures, confusingly close of course to a "campaign setting" which is the world one's campaign is set in. campaign-setting is a bad tag for this, campaign-development is fine. Complaining about "adventure", a real RPG thing, strikes me as pedantic and leads to this wrangling. adventure-writing? Well it's not writing it's choosing! adventure-running? Do all tags have to be a sentence strung together with hyphens? It adds as much valuable context as dnd-3.5e does practically, so it's fine. Read and understand The Death of Meta Tags - they're talking about purely unhelpful things like "subjective," not tags that usefully set scope.

Answer 2

First,

retagging is perfectly fine and encouraged. We want people to appropriately categorize questions. If they feel like the question needs different tags then that's great, retag away. The only caveat to this is that one should actually do a good job retagging a question.

Now, as to whether this particular situation represents good tagging, let's look at all the tags individually.

• dnd-3.5e - this is good, it sets up the question, provides the necessary context. Good Tag

• campaign-development - looks good, the author wants a campaign. Except when we read the tag wiki, it's about writing or expanding campaigns, not about selecting one. Bad Tag

• campaign-settings - I'm kind of ambivalent on this one, there is no tag wiki here so it's kind of hard to know right off what it's intended for. Lets look at how it has been used in the past: looks like it's usually about asking for more detail on a specific setting. That's not a good fit here. Bad Tag

• system-recommendation - Now we're getting into the edits. A moderator added this tag. While I think it's actually more appropriate than some of the other tags here, the question is not asking for a system, it's asking for an adventure with the system already determined. Bad Tag

• adventure - Anther tag with no tag wiki. However, this tag is ultimately a meta tag (as is system-recommendation. That makes it's inclusion a bad thing, just based on the existence of the tag.

Ultimately what we need here is a new tag. adventure-recomendation. However, I discourage this. Any question that needs this tag should be closed. We should not be in the business of recommending things. (see Q&A is hard, let's go shopping)*

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*author note: this is the opinion of the post author and should not be taken as site policy.