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Does this site really need a tag?

Nearly every question is about some character in one way or another. And wouldn't work as the sole tag on a question, which makes it a meta tag and therefore undesirable, according to SE central policy.

The purpose of tags is supposed to be for experts in a given subject to find questions to answer on that subject, but there are obviously no experts on characters in general.

I propose the burnination of the tag.

Who's with me?

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I think that this tag is useless.

No one is going to look for all of the questions about all characters in all movies or TV shows.

Most questions with this tag are about a specific character in a specific film... Which means that the film tag should be more than sufficient. There's no need to further point out "hey, this question is just about one character"... and the spotty usage of it shows that it's not helpful.

Here are a few questions that are about "characters", have fewer than five tags and yet, don't have the tag.

And that's just from the front page and it's just the ones I absolutely know "should" have it.

If we're going to use it to classify questions but most of the questions that "deserve" it don't have it... then the tag is useless. Get rid of it.

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    +1, and good point about the spotty usage. If this tag isn't burninated, it looks like a massive retag will be in order.
    – Rand al'Thor
    Jun 21, 2016 at 16:05
  • +1, I believe that most of the questions using [character] can be properly tagged with [plot-explanation] or [analysis] instead.
    – Luciano
    Jun 23, 2016 at 15:42
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I don't think that this tag, character, is useless.

"Nearly every question is about some character". It's good word choice: "near" ...it`s not the same than all. I've made questions about characters myself and I like them: one question with over 5 votes on Hodor, from Game of Thrones, and others less popular questions on Gilfoyle, from Silicon Valley, and even on God, in Supernatural. Maybe vote popularity has to do with show/movie popularity, so that might not be such a huge issue. Just my opinion.

On the other hand they're tons of tags not related to characters, just some to mention: film-techniques, production, animation, soundtrack, title, effects, props, among the most used tags on site.

The second point: that "character wouldn't work as the sole tag on a question" seems sound. However, keeping the tag even as a secondary one can help to do cross searches on a topic, such as different aspects of a movie. For example it's not the same between these two sets of tags:

  • fight-club, props, ending, production
  • fight-club, character, dialogue, analysis, plot-explanation
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  • What about the issue Catija raised, that the tag isn't used consistently and there are many questions which are about some character but don't have the character tag?
    – Rand al'Thor
    Jun 22, 2016 at 11:15
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    @randal'thor But is the occasional misuse of a tag really a good enough reason to kill it?
    – Walt
    Jun 22, 2016 at 13:24
  • @Walt It's not occasional... I have a feeling that it's probably a large percentage of the questions. I haven't done a study but It wouldn't surprise me if it were 20%+.
    – Catija
    Jun 22, 2016 at 13:53
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    We're not here to discuss all of the other tags. All (or most) of those other tags can allow people to specialize. If you're an animator, you would be interested in questions about animation or if you work in a production you might be better able to answer questions about the production of a film. These are very different than "character". No one specializes in "characters".
    – Catija
    Jun 22, 2016 at 14:02
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    No one specializes in plot-explanations either...
    – cde
    Jun 23, 2016 at 2:37

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