Is there a general usage guideline for tagging between editions of the same system where editions are very similar?

Question

To start with the simple case: with DnD, we tag by edition like dnd-5e, dnd-3.5e, pathfinder etc. It's an understandable practice, as rules and content vary wildly by edition. A question regarding a particular edition could almost never be answered by sources of another edition, and dungeons-and-dragons is used for questions that consider the franchise as whole.

But that sort of difference between editions, while not limited to DnD, is not universal among RPG systems. For example, Apocalypse World 1e and 2e are very similar in content and especially underlying mechanics, to the point where edition-specific questions are far, far harder to come by than edition-agnostic ones. This makes me sort of fuzzy on how we should actually tag the questions.

Looking at apocalypse-world, by far most of the questions would have identical answers for 1e and 2e. apocalypse-world-2e doesn't have a single question whose answer isn't equally relevant to 1e. Knowing that any answers are likely to apply to both editions makes me want to tag questions as both, but if one always wants to use two tags, couldn't they just be one?

What is the proper usage of the edition-specific tags with Apocalypse World and other systems, where edition differences tend to remain minor?

Answer 1

In general when editions are very similar, we don't bother with different tags.

Essentially we trust the community to emergently tag stuff in a way that makes sense for that play community. No one on God's green Earth cares about Call of Cthulhu version 1 vs 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6 (possible exception for 7th) so there's just a call-of-cthulhu tag. If you do know you're asking for a version dependent thing in that world, you just say "Hey is that sample haunted house adventure from 5e in the 6e book?" But for games that are more crunchy and rules vary, the community does the same thing they organically do on forums and whatnot, and say "no, this is for Mutants and Masterminds 2e..."

Artificially adding versions when it doesn't help is harmful and fragments discussion especially for less popular games (i.e. anything but D&Dworld).

Sometimes people do overzealously split tags, like with Apocalypse World. Then new folks see the version differences and use it in good faith, even if a "1e answer is the same." C'est la vie, cat's out of the bag.

Basically be very conservative about adding versioned system tags, because once they're there, the damage is done.