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Recently there was the addition of , a meta tag intended to tag questions which request the chronological or intended viewing order or a particular series. The following questions were suggested to be tagged:

The Sci-fi & Fantasy StackExchange has a 'suggested-order' tag which is similar to this idea. That said, this tag does not seem necessary, but there are pros and cons.

Pros
  • All viewing-order-related questions will be easily accessible.
  • Anyone wishing to answer only questions related to viewing order can have this tag followed.
Cons
  • It is highly unlikely that there can be an expert in viewing orders. This was largely the reason for avoiding meta tags thus far.
  • There probably won't ever be a question that will receive an answer from someone who had followed, but not any of the series in question.

Should we keep , or is this another meta tag that should go by the wayside?

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  • Alrighty then. Sorry for causing some trouble by creating this tag. I also noticed there is another (similar, in my opinion) tag: reference. Not sure if there can be a specialist in references either, so you guys decide if you want to get rid of that tag too. Just bringing this to your attention.
    – Hakase
    Commented Aug 22, 2013 at 9:49
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    @user1306322 No need to apologize. As for [reference], I'll bring it up with some others and we'll see if it merits a tag. Thanks for the mention.
    – Cattua
    Commented Aug 22, 2013 at 17:01

2 Answers 2

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I think we should get rid of . I come to this conclusion based on the points I made in the question: There will probably not be an expert on viewing orders in general, and the answers will likely come from people who are intimate with the tagged series.

In lieu of , any viewing-order-related questions should be tagged with any and all series that it pertains directly to. Some examples:

However, as mentioned, I do not believe that these questions warrant their own unique tag. Additionally, should be removed from any existing questions.

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  • Per consensus here, and in the absence of dissenting voices, I have removed viewing-order from all questions that had it (and done a bit of cleanup along the way).
    – senshin
    Commented Dec 6, 2013 at 17:36
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I'm not convinced that is a meta tag. There's basically no debate as to what questions fit under it. It also requires some skill to answer these questions, especially when the series was not released in chronological order. Writing a good spoiler-free answer to these questions does require a bit of skill.

With that said, I'm not sure that the tag helps more than it hurts. The primary issue I have with it is that if we apply it consistently it will take up the top spot on most questions, which is significant for the purposes of SEO. The top tag which is not already a part of the question gets added at the beginning of the question title. That means that most of these questions, when indexed by Google, will begin with "viewing-order", possibly pushing more important keywords into worse positions. For example, for the question "What is the chronological order of the Monogatari Series?", the most important keywords are "Monogatari series" and "chronological". "viewing order" isn't important and isn't very helpful.

Admittedly, all of this is pretty minor, but the benefits are also minimal. For most series, there are only a small number of users here who have seen it (often in the single digits), and they're the only ones qualified to answer this sort of question. I don't really think it will lead to any more questions getting better answers at this stage, and it's more likely to get out of hand than to aid people. In this case, I don't see the added troubles being worth it for us right now. When we get to a size that we have a sizable number of users for a lot of series, it may be worth reconsidering this. Also, if SE creates a new feature that would allow us to not have this tag influence SEO as much then it might be worth having.

So tl;dr, I agree that we should get rid of the tag for now, but for different reasons than the other answer.

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