Specific scene / Dialogue / quote tags

Question

This question is about two tags - dialogue and quote (and to a lesser extent specific-scene).

Dialogue is defined as: Questions related to specific pieces of a work's spoken word.

Quote is: A brief excerpt from a character's lines in a movie for question emphasis or analysis

Are both of these tags necessary? I can see why dialogue is difference from a quote, but looking through question histories it seems that often they've been used interchangeably (often paired with specific-scene as well).

I'm basically seeing do we want to do anything about this, or simply make it clearer.

For example, if a question is about a specific line in the film, is that specific-scene? Or is that specific-scene and quote? If a question is about the meaning of several lines, is that specific-scene and dialogue?

What would people consider the proper use of all of these, as currently I feel, looking at all the dialogue questions, the quote questions and the specific scene questions, there is a bit of confusion and lack of consistency over this.

Answer 1

I agree that they have been used a bit confusingly, especially as of recent.

I could see how quote has some specific meaning compared to the more general dialogue, i.e. when used for a specific characteristic line and especially in contexts other than mere explanation, like reference-style questions or origin questions. However, in the majority of cases the difference to dialogue is quite muddled and its hard to assess when something is a singular quote conpared to more complex dialogue, and especially in the context of dialogue-explanation type questions I would prefer dialogue over quote anyway.

I would thus propose to make quote a synonym of dialogue.

I would, however, not interfere this further with specific-scene, which to me is rather orthogonal to both dialogue and quote. Well, the usage of specific-scene is a bit confusing in itself (afterall, many questions are about a specific scene), but all in all specific-scene has its uses, I guess. But I would treat the (dis)advantages of specific-scene separately from the dialogue problem. I am personally not a particularly big fan of using specific-scene for dialogue-explanation questions, but haven't ever seen it as too big a problem to warrant retagging, though.