Tagging: "poem" or "poems"?
Simple question. For people's original poems posted in ~creative, should they be tagged "poem" or "poems"?
"poetry" is the broader category, and includes discussions about poets and poetry in general. However, when someone posts their poem, should that be tagged "poem" or "poems"?
The tagging guidelines say (or used to say - since I re-organised the Docs pages, I can't find this reference any more) that tags should be plural. That indicates that "poems" is the better tag. But the post contains a single poem, which makes "poem" the better tag.
Opinions?
EDIT: In the end, I went with the popular choice. When I looked at the tags used in ~creative, I found over a hundred topics tagged "poem" and only four topics tagged "poems". It seems that most people naturally choose "poem" when posting a poem, so I standardised the few differently tagged topics to use "poem".
Great idea.
I intend to standardise the tags in ~creative based on the outcome of this discussion, so this topic would be the only one remaining with the non-standard tag.
That might come under the issue of tag synonyms, so that people could use both and they would be treated the same.
(Personally, I favour non-abbreviations over abbreviations where possible, to avoid ambiguity and confusion.)
Good point: I've previously been tagging people's poems as 'poetry', but I do think it makes more sense to tag them as either 'poem' or 'poems' and to use 'poetry' as a broader term (referring, as you suggested, to everything from single pieces to discussion of the art as a whole).
As for for whether 'poem' or 'poems' is better, I'm not sure.
On a closely related note, it occurred to me the other day that when tagging original content (OC), it might be a good idea to include what type of OC it is in the tag itself.
I've been tagging things as 'original content' and 'poetry', but a combined tag ('original content.poetry'1) might be more useful because it allows people to filter out certain types of OC (say, "original content.poetry") while still keeping other types of OC (say, "original content.calligraphy").
1 is this how the tag hierarchy works? I've never tried making my own tag before.
Technically, yes. A hierarchical tag has a main tag indicating a broad category and a sub-tag indicating a specific example of that broader category. So, if we consider "poetry" a sub-category of "original content", then
original content.poetrywould be a valid hierarchical tag.The question then becomes a subjective one, rather than an objective one: is poetry a sub-category of original content? Personally, I think poetry is a sub-category of literature. Others might think differently (knowing my track record, they probably do!).
As for filtering out certain types of original content, one can also do that by filtering out
poems(if we choose this to tag poems with).My thinking is that some people might be interested in traditionally published art (calligraphy, poems, music, etc.) but not interested in original content versions of those same arts.
So someone might be interested in a poem by WB Yeats (tag: poems) but not a poem by me (tag: original content.poems).
Good point.
However, that just changes the main question to: