Should we have an anime-specific tag?

Question

This spawned from a discussion on the chat earlier today. There were some differences of opinion as to whether or not this is a good idea.

In When should we use the anime and manga tags?, we decided to get rid of the tags anime and manga, as they were very prone to misuse. It was not at all obvious that these referred to questions which were asking only about the anime version or manga version (respectively). While it hasn't yet been implemented, presumably a similar fate will eventually meet visual-novel, light-novel, and other similar tags.

There is a way to fix this other than getting rid of the tags. As karategeek6 proposed on his answer there (which has not gotten many comments or votes), we could use more explicit tags like manga-specific and anime-specific. These are more self-explanatory, so they are unlikely to be used inappropriately.

So, in principle, we can keep the tags that got deleted, just with minor modifications to make them less ambiguous. However, it's not clear whether or not we actually want to.

Is it a good idea to re-implement the deleted tags in the form anime-specific and manga-specific, or should we keep things the way they are right now and not have tags for these at all?

Answer 1

Personally, I am a fan of having tags anime-specific and manga-specific, along with related tags for other formats. This solves the biggest problem with the originals, namely overuse.

The main criticism I can see with the tags is that they don't provide much useful differentiation. Most people have a number of series that they are interested in and follow both the manga and anime, and a lot of the other questions will be about things that they haven't even watched. Slicing the other way, namely based on medium rather than series, would seem to be a pretty pointless endeavor.

I would like to argue against that viewpoint. While it is true that the majority of people have favorite series, most people also have favorite media. Currently, two people are following visual-novel and two more on light-novel. These formats are likely to attract a different crowd than most anime and manga, in part because they typically require some knowledge of Japanese.

Furthermore, a lot of people are only interested in canon materials, and want to avoid anything that isn't canon. Those people could ignore anime-specific which would filter out a lot of questions about filler episodes and other uninteresting content.

And finally, these questions can also be about things related to the medium, rather than the content. There aren't many questions like this on the main site at the moment (excluding those tagged as anime-production, which I think is separate), but a good example of a question like this is Why was The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya broadcast out of sequence?. The question is at least partially medium-specific, and likewise my answer was very much medium-dependent. So someone interested in anime in an academic sense would probably have interest in things like this. To be sure, even in the good cases, there's some grey area in which variations and anime-production could also apply to some of these questions, but certainly not all of them.

Of course, all of these are pretty uncommon, and the tags should probably be used sparingly. But at least in principle, they do provide some useful differentiation. I don't think they will be heavily followed, but I also don't see anything bad about allowing them in the modified version.

Answer 2

I disagree with having a tag that only functions in the presence of another tag.

• No one wants to follow/ignore "anime-specific", and if they do, it's probably being misused. They might want to follow/ignore gasaraki-manga, but not manga-specific. The -specific tags are a symptom of an unwillingness to massively (and confusingly) expand the tag list, but still a desire to subdivide them.
• They are not actually meta-tags, but they suffer from most of the same problems. The categories are too big, and they don't specifically relate to the item in question. Adding tags that only work in concert with the other tags is not a good idea.
• To someone who is new to the site, which is more likely? Immediately realizing that they should add anime-specific or asking "In the anime foo, did the biz work because of baz?". Even for cases where it's appropriate to use, the title or opening line is a better way to distinguish the preference for a particular type of answer.