Are our implicit-information tagging practices becoming a problem?

Question

We have some tags that seem to regularly get used such that they imply information about the post, which isn’t actually stated in the post itself.

• our various system tags, including [system-agnostic]. The asker will very often just tag with their system, and not mention it in tags or title.
• [rules-as-written], which comes with various rules like you have to stick to RAW interpretations and probably do citations.

These seem to be becoming a problem sometimes.

Not always! One of the standard uses of a system tag is to ask about a game’s mechanic, then use, say, the [dnd-3.5e] tag as the only definitive indication of what game you’re actually playing. This goes smoothly enough.

But it does lead to some problems in some cases.

1. Tagging multiple systems when their relationship is unclear

We’ve got this convention of describing the system only in the tags, right? This causes some problems in questions tagged with a mixture of [dnd-3e] [dnd-3.5e] and [pathfinder], though. Consider this question:

This involves D&D 3e and 3.5e somehow. But how? This question is explicitly interested in material from both editions, but what about 3e features which have been explicitly altered in 3.5e? This information isn’t specified the question.

The same author later asked a second question that did specify the important information in the question - they say at the end what systems they’re using how, and give meaning to the tags:

(To be doubly clear, this screenshot is an example of good behaviour, not problematic behaviour.)

2. Non-system agnostic system agnostic questions.

Following the trend that system tags don’t need to correlate strictly to question content, there is an often-arising type of question: one that is tagged [system-agnostic], and which says: “If it helps, I’m playing in {system}”. As an example:

What does the [system-agnostic] tag mean here, truthfully? If we specify solutions that don’t work in NWOD 2e, we do not provide a valid answer to the querent’s problem. I retagged this particular question, put the last sentence at the beginning (and rewrote it), and left a comment:

This kind of situation is why I brought up Should I use a narrow system tag, or go broad if possible and use system-agnostic? a while ago, to verify if this stance made any sense and had the community’s support.

3. Rules as written questions, where RAW constraints aren’t described

We get a lot of questions that specify they have certain rules constraints, e.g. “please cite your answer so I can show those rules in the book to my GM.” Or, “please stick to RAW, I’m not interested in interpretations.”

However, sometimes we’ll get a question that asks how certain mechanics work, then just has a [rules-as-written tag]:

But what does the tag mean in this case? What rules-as-written constraints does the asker have? Answerers get bitten, because other readers interpret the rules-as-written tag to mean various things not described in the question, and when it’s a new user, they’d have no idea anyway:

Should we do something? If so, what?

I hope I’ve at least conveyed that there’s a problem arising regularly, and some of you have probably run into these situations multiple times before.

Part of the problem is that I generally don't see these cases acted on, so the questions will still be in this state months later (if this wasn't the case I wouldn't be raising this question).

Is this enough of a problem we need to change things? If so, what should change?

Previous discussions on [system-agnostic]: Is [system-agnostic] a meta tag? / Is the "system-agnostic" tag really necessary? / Do we need the System-Agnostic Tag? / Does the [system-agnostic] tag conflict with system specific tags?

And on [rules-as-written]: Reviewing the usefulness of type-of-answer tags / What are the Pros and Cons of the rules-as-written tag?

Answer 1

This is not a problem specific to tags.

Someone can always make an unclear question. They can do it with words in the title, words in the question or words in the tags. The site response to lack of clarity is, I trust, well trod enough not to require me to go over it. Get them to clarify, vote to close if needed.

Tags do convey implicit information, which is why they exist, have tag wikis, etc. It's good, and a useful shorthand. If someone wants a system-agnostic technique they don't need to spend a paragraph explaining "I want a technique I can use across the various games I run, man". I can only imagine most attempts at doing this would lead to even more pedantic arguing in comments.

This is a long way to go for a pretty simple answer.

For example, game system tags are pretty self explanatory. If it says [dnd-5e] then it can be assumed to be a normal D&D 5e question. Some uses of tags are clear.

However, just adding a tag sometimes doesn't really give enough information, or at least is going to create bad answers. "Give me a way to alternate melee and ranged attacks" simply tagged with [feat] isn't going to sufficiently signal to an answerer that you only want feats as an answer to the question. This use of a tag is unclear.

If your question is not clear - make it clear, using tags, words in the body, words in the title, etc.

If you do not understand a question - including its tag use - ask for clarification. It's the actual intended, constructive use of the comment system.

Answer 2

Reading all the comments here, rules-as-written seems to impose restrictions on the answer which is very rare for SE sites and therefor not very intuitive. Normally, tags are used to grant information and filtering about the question. I'm not sure if a tag is the correct way to impose those restrictions, but if something is required, I think we should make it easy to understand. This is a gaming website, I don't want to read the small print on all tags just to not break any rules. If this tag means that a citation from the rules is required, then by all means name it that way. answer-must-quote-rulebook or answer-requires-rule-citation or whatever else works. No small print, no hidden costs, no lawyers involved. In addition, we could use a pattern where a tag starting with answer-x-y-z sets requirements for the answer of a question. Maybe RAW will not be the only one.

Answer 3

This is a problem only in the cases where you've noticed a problem: tags that aren't obvious and clear from the question asked. Where the problem can be noticed though, it can be fixed and is already being solved naturally.

It's where misuse can go unnoticed and causes damage that it's a problem. And I have an idea to fix that case.

• rules-as-written: this gets used as a "Hmm, I'm asking about rules, let's type rules into the tag box, oh, there's the tag for rules questions! *click*".

  This is a special problem with the RAW tag because it's a binary "switch" that can be on or off, and questions about rules can look perfectly consistent with and without it. That means when the tag is misused by a novice user, the misuse is undetectable and uncorrectable; but its presence triggers experienced users to give radically different answers. This is damage to our answer quality!

  To solve this we could revive the rules tag to catch these naive but self-destructive "I need a tag that says 'rules' somewhere because I'm asking about rules" uses, which we can then see and remove. We could even synonym it to something like dont-use-this-tag or deprecated-tag so that it's really obvious to us that the poster tried to do something we need them to not do (i.e., tag every last rules question with a tag that says "rules" in it somewhere). The indirection of a synonym has the added benefit that we won't discourage them from choosing rules, which is important because if we in any way hint to a naive user that they shouldn't use rules then they'll just say "Oh, OK!" and helpfully use rules-as-written instead...

• system-agnostic: This doesn't have the same problem as the RAW tag, because whether it belongs on a question or not doesn't need mind-reading.

  • When it conflicts with the body, we know there's something wrong and we need to clarify.
  • When it conflicts with other tags, we know there's something wrong and we ask to clarify.
  • When it's not obviously out of place... it doesn't cause damage the way rules-as-written does.

  When it is the wrong tag, but that's not obvious, it means it fits the body of the question. But even then, we will often challenge the body of the question, and ask them to tell us what game they're playing so that we can answer more usefully. (Lots of people just assume that every RPG works like the RPG they're playing but with different dice for the same thing; I think this is the motive for this kind of misuse of system-agnostic.)

  In effect, system-agnostic doesn't suffer destructive misuse because our normal "uh, can you clarify your question?" processes already catch the situations where it could be misused destructively.

• Mixing system tags: as you've astutely pointed out in the question, we notice when a mix is invalid, isn't obviously justified, or hints at something they've left out and should really come out and tell us. It's just like system-agnostic that way: the situations in which system-tag mixing can be a problem are already situations we don't let slide; the tag mixing will get fixed as a side-effect of our normal "hey, problem with your question as-written" habits and procedures.

[rules-as-written] is the only tag that has this problem

So really, that just leaves rules-as-written as problematic.

To fix its misuse, I propose we recreate the rules tag as a kind of honeypot to catch people who would misuse rules-as-written, and synonym rules to something like dont-use-this-tag so that rules can remain never-used and to facilitate cleanup. It's like giving the site mind-reading powers! It should drastically cut down on the mistagging of rules-as-written, and thereby improve the quality and topicality of our answers for naive rules-question-having users.

Answer 4

I am not sure there is a problem to solve here. People are always going to misuse tags, and my understanding of site policy is that when it is spotted as an issue in a question, an appropriate edit should be made, with a comment if necessary. This feels no different to any of the multitude of other reasons we have to make edits.

Sure, some tags are tricky to use correctly (RAW I'm looking at you), but contorting tag mechanics in unnatural ways isn't the way to deal with this.

Answer 5

Don’t rely on tags to provide meaning (usually).

I think the problems in these cases mainly comes from these tags being just ambiguous enough to be a problem: when one uses [rules-as-written], [system-agnostic], or multiple system tags, there's a few different things they could mean in each case. Of course, the asker and all readers could assume they've all communicated and understood the one correct meaning, but that's unlikely. In cases like the above, the situation's left ambiguous, just that nobody's asking for clarification.

In all cases, I think we need to stop treating these tags as having implicit clear meaning, because they don't. In the cases above, I'm left having to wonder what exactly the tag means there out of the possible meanings, with no clear answer available.

Whatever information the author is attempting to communicate with these tags should be in the question to make it clear and unambiguous the sort of results they want. Then the tag can be used if it correlates to what’s being described in the question. Note this isn't a suggestion to change these tags or really change the system, it's a suggestion that we treat these situations as ambiguous, and respond as we usually would: request clarification, vote to close as unclear if necessary, etc.

• Someone using the rules-as-written tag should be specifying their RAW constraints. If they don't have any, they probably shouldn't be using the tag.

• If someone's playing in a specific system (that they have stated in the question) and asking for help with a problem they'll be applying in that system, and they've used the [system-agnostic] tag, it should be clear from their question why that tag is there: Do they want to apply this to multiple systems? Are they using their own homebrew thing? Otherwise they should probably just be using their system's tag.

• If someone's tagged their question with multiple systems or editions, they should be specifying their relationship to those and make it obvious why each tag is there.

As for our practice of not mentioning the system when we’re using just one and it’s tagged: that’s generally harmless, and I don't think we should change that. As SSD noted in comments, that will generally result in boilerplate that was not ambiguous to begin with.