Shall we review the various World of Darkness tags' use? [duplicate]

Question

The recent spate of V:tR questions from a new user has brought the mess of WoD tags to my attention. (And I do like cleaning up messy tag clusters.)

• According to its tag wiki, world-of-darkness is only for asking about the setting:

  The [world-of-darkness] tag should be used for questions concerning the setting of White Wolf's supernatural games. For questions concerning the mechanics, use [storyteller-system] for oWoD/cWoD games and [storytelling-system] for nWoD ones.

  It's being habitually put on every question about a White Wolf WoD game, though, which results in tag soup like world-of-darkness vampire-the-requiem nwod storytelling-system. Clearly there is a degree of redundancy here that is contrary to the tagging system's purpose.

  To add to the mess, I have no idea where the consensus for using world-of-darkness for only setting questions came from. Messier still, it's the synonym for wod, which people use as a system tag instead of a setting tag.

• storytelling-system and storyteller-system are supposed to be used for rules questions, but instead we get nwod and wod (which synonyms to world-of-darkness) used for rules questions. Obviously our stated use for these tags isn't how users actually tag naturally: do we synonym away the "xwod" tags to their respective storytell(er|ing)-system tags, or do we go with the flow (and the SEO) and use the nWoD and WoD tags? (Actually, synonyming them to the systems might be a clever thing: "owod" and "nwod" are easier to remember than whether it's an -ing or an -er for nwod/owod, making proper system-tagging happen more automatically.)

• Is nwod for only setting Qs too? Or is it a system tag? It doesn't say in its tag wiki, but because it's the complement of wod (which synonyms to world-of-darkness) it's implied that it's for only setting questions by our tag structure. Unless the tag wiki for world-of-darkness is wrong, of course.

• Do we need to tag a question with storytelling-system when it's already tagged with vampire-the-requiem, or with storyteller-system when it's already tagged with vampire-the-masquerade or any of the other oWoD games? Is it redundant, or useful?

• owod and cwod don't exist, even as synonyms. I'm surprised they're not being constantly applied by new users to old/classic WoD questions. Should we make them synonyms of… whatever we decide to do with the rest of the tags?

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Previous meta discussions

There's an old discussion about needing to split nWoD and oWoD questions, but it doesn't deal with taxonomy beyond "yes we should have separate tags".

There's an old discussion about the tag hierarchy for WoD tags. It mentions that world-of-darkness was already intended to be for setting Qs, but doesn't say where or when that was decided. It proposes that world-of-darkness be used like we do dungeons-and-dragons as a tag for general Qs that aren't specific to any edition or that do meaningfully span editions, but the tag wiki wasn't changed to reflect that consensus (if it was a consensus), and it's not being used that way now anyway. (i.e., not every dnd-3.5e question also has dungeons-and-dragons on it, but that's what we're seeing with WoD questions and world-of-darkness). So, it's not being used according to its tag wiki nor this discussion's answer.

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I don't have a useful opinion on this beyond "the status quo is awful", because I'm not a WoD player and don't have the nuanced familiarity with the various names' relationships to devise a "right" hierarchy, and I don't have the familiarity with the WoD community to judge what sorts of tags will align with how the terms are actually used in the wild. I am an editing junkie though, and we should have our tags set up such that anyone with a reasonable comprehension of a question can use the tag wikis as a reference for fixing the tags on a new question from a user uninitiated in the Ways of the Tag.

Answer 1

For clarity, this is the proposed tag set. There is no real hierarchy so far, so there is no tag nesting. Synonyms are listed under the tag that they resolve to.

^{This post to be edited as proposed changes are accepted so that it is an actionable & canonical reference.}

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• world-of-darkness for cross-edition, all edition, and generic questions [1]
• classic-world-of-darkness for original World of Darkness
  • storyteller-system
  • owod
  • cwod
• new-world-of-darkness for new World of Darkness
  • storytelling-system
  • nwod

Usage notes:

1. We will often see people tag with world-of-darkness when they mean nWoD, just like we see people tag with dungeons-and-dragons when they mean D&D 4e. That's OK: we just retag as it happens, just like with D&D.

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Unresolved issues before this is actionable (i.e. FIXMEs):

^{This section to be removed upon ratification.}

1. Did I miss any?

2. Where does a wod tag fit in here? We don't currently have one, so maybe we won't see people trying to use it and we don't need one. If we do find we need one, does it synonym to world-of-darkness by direct acronym meaning, or to new-world-of-darkness since that's how White Wolf uses "WoD" now and what most new users who might tag with wod will typically mean? Do we need a [wod] tag?

3. I'm explicitly proposing that we not tag everying with world-of-darkness. Yes, that means that we won't have a single tag to find all WoD questions ever, but I think it would be contrary to the tagging mechanics. People can add *world-of-darkness to their Favourite Tags list and it will highlight all three tags. Does this have support? Or does it need further discussion?

Answer 2

Okay. Here's some ideas about it.

• I think that having a world-of-darkness is a useful thing, because pan-WoD fandom is a real phenomenon. Allowing people to find all the WoD questions at once seems useful. (Also, because having the single tag allows for the tag-badge to be created more quickly.)
• I like the idea of making storyteller and storytelling systems synonymous with owod/cwod and nwod, respectively.
• I am no longer certain that a setting tag is required in light of those things.

So maybe what we need is two tags, world-of-darkness-classic and world-of-darkness-new, that covers the two main branches of the game?

Answer 3

I think that most World of Darkness fans don't make much distinction between the Storyteller and Storytelling systems. I could be wrong but I tend to think in terms of Old/Classic World of Darkness (owod/cwod cause I'm lazy) and New World of Darkness (nwod) lines and I think most fans do so as well. I think the lines better represent the settings and system as a whole. Associating the appropriate system to the related line would be very pratical.

Also to add in extra confusion the forthcoming God Machine Chronicles (best info I can find) will update some of the nWoD rules. It's basically the core blue book 2.0. So we're going to have 2 variants of that system in the next year or so.

Answer 4

Not sure how to format something as a tag, but here's my take on it.

I would say that rules questions probably only need the most localized version of the rules they're using, and do not need to tag things above it in the hierarchy. If I know an asker is playing Werewolf-The Apocalypse, then also saying it is oWoD or Storyteller-System is redundant. A rules question should probably only be tagged with the specific core book we're using. We should use these they way we use D&D3.5 or D&D 4th ed.

nWod and oWod (or even just WoD) are a good way to refer to groups of books, and such could be used the same way Dungeons and Dragons is used. I could see them being used for setting questions as well, since the overall setting between different books in nWoD is mostly similar. (oWod is less so.) xWoD could still be used for setting and comparison questions, and maybe for some rules questions, though each core book makes its own rules changes. (nWoD is more consistent, oWoD is less consistent.)

WoD should be a synonym of World of Darkness- that's what the acronym means, and anything else is probably going to confuse people.

Storyteller is... a bit abstract at this point. All WoD games, plus Exalted, are storyteller games as far as I can tell. There's no way we could answer a rules or setting question on Storyteller, though we could probably compare them.

I'd suggest keeping the tags higher on the hierarchy for comparison questions, and nWoD can probably be used for setting questions. For most other setting questions, and all rules questions, specific core books should be used.

Answer 5

I think I've finally come up with a satisfying reason to keep the general and game-specific tags on entries. The analogy isn't dungeons-and-dragons and dnd-4e; it's dnd-4e and fighter or druid. The individual subgames are, realistically, the splats of the greater setting; they're not quite classes, but when looking at the game lines as a whole, that's the function they serve. (Sub-splats, like clan or tribe or tradition, would be the equivalent of "builds"; not necessarily deserving of their own tags unless really popular.)

I still endorse the eventual changeover to classic-world-of-darkness and new-world-of-darkness, but I think that having them accompany the vampire-masquerade or changeling-lost is a good idea.