Fixing umbrella tag of mutants-and-masterminds

Question

I recently noticed that mutants-and-masterminds was largely being used in conjunction with either the mutants-and-masterminds-2e or mutants-and-masterminds-3e tags, but not discussing the overarching system. I changed the tag info and description, but noting that I do plan, once I'm home from work, to quickly go in and fix tags. Two questions:

1. Should I space out the edits so as to not accidentally dominate the front page?
2. There are currently no questions tagged for 1e that I noticed. I assume it's probably best to not create one until we need it, and to suggest on the tag usage to just use the umbrella one should there be such a question, and we can fix it in post?

I guess third question:

3. For questions asking about the difference between two editions, should those two edition tags be used, and not the umbrella tag?

Answer 1

Generally yes edits should be spaced out to avoid overwhelming the front page, and typically questions asking about the differences between two editions have been tagged edition-comparison plus the two editions concerned.

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This question seems to be jumping the gun however. The first question we ask about this shouldn't be “How do I handle this restructure?” but instead “Should we restructure Mutants & Masterminds's tags, and should we do it like this?” and as far as I can tell that step got skipped completely.

Our Dungeons & Dragons tags have some special handling to use the dungeons-and-dragons tag only to discuss the system broadly and not for questions about specific editions, but that's not the default way to handle things, only the most visible. It's the rule we chose to apply to D&D's tags to help us keep things manageable in its expansive landscape, and other systems might have similar tagging rules applied if they need them.

The default way we handle system tags is the default for all tags, “do whatever seems right”, which has shown up in a few past discussions about different systems:

• Is there a general usage guideline for tagging between editions of the same system where editions are very similar?
• Should these GURPS questions have an edition-specific system tag?
• What is the difference between the [fate] and [fate-core] tags?

That same idea came up in a question about how to structure Mutants & Masterminds in 2014:

• Do we need more Mutants and masterminds edition tags?

Back in 2014, we had an actual discussion about how we wanted to handle World of Darkness system tags as we looked to reorganise things, which is essentially what I'm suggesting should be happening here first:

• Clean up tagging for "World of Darkness" related questions

The mutants-and-masterminds tag contains instructions to handle it like D&D, but as you note, you added those instructions just before asking this meta; they weren't pre-existing. We should be cautious about essentially unilaterally restructuring a tag when that might not even be necessary or wanted by its other players. Granted, you're one of those players, and that counts for a lot, but nobody else has apparently had a chance to weigh in on this yet.

So instead of going straight to “I'm restructuring this, how should I do it”, I suggest the first conversation should be whether it's even helpful to do this so that Mutants & Masterminds players have a chance to comment on how their game should be organised on this site. This will also let people weigh in on your question #2 about what to do regarding a first edition tag.