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Whenever there are multiple films with the same name (remakes, franchise reboots and such) usually we create and to differentiate them. However (bear with me, maybe it's just a stupid idea) what about separating the year from the movie tag itself? So we'd have and we for a new version of that movie .

This way we could search movies by the year, and whenever we search a movie by name we'd see all versions at once (and if you want to be more specific you could simply add the specific year tag to the search field).

I was thinking this after asking a question for Suspiria (2018) and seeing that there's still no specific tag for the 2018 version. In this case we'd have a for both movies and we'd have for questions about the original movie and for the most recent version.

Does it make sense? Would this be helpful?

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    You can already search for all versions of the film with [suspiria*]. Searching by exact year on the other hand doesn't really make sense, though, even that could technically be done with [*-1987], provided it was included in the tagname. But no, speparating them seems rather pointless and bound to lead to utter chaos.
    – Napoleon Wilson Mod
    Jul 29, 2019 at 11:38
  • wow much downvotes... @NapoleonWilson good point, I don't know why I didn't think of using wildcards in the tag. But then I as a user have to think that there might be multiple versions before doing the search (I think it's a small UX friction).
    – Luciano
    Jul 29, 2019 at 11:49
  • @NapoleonWilson my initial thought was that it could be useful to search for movies from a specific year (but probably not that useful as you demonstrated with the *). I can see how it could indeed create chaos, that's why I wanted to ask the question, thanks for your view on it.
    – Luciano
    Jul 29, 2019 at 11:56
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    The fact that rarely anyone cares or even knows what exact year a film was released is part of why I don't think there's much of a point to this and also part of why I don't think this would work in practice anyway. Though, there's more academic reasons about the consistency of the tagging system, too.
    – Napoleon Wilson Mod
    Jul 29, 2019 at 12:01
  • @NapoleonWilson yes I was thinking more from the perspective of searching for movies instead of questions about movies, I guess it would make more sense on IMDB or rotten tomatoes than here.
    – Luciano
    Jul 29, 2019 at 12:11
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    The problem is that the tag system is just really basic and doesn't allow for stuff like that. The same way you can't search for films with specific actors or from specific directors without messing up the tag system. What it really lacks is a tag hierarchy. But as you say, that's not really its purpose and on other sites, this might not be as useful as here. As to the existing year-appendage to the film name in tags, this is primarily used for disambiguation here, not for classification. Technically, you're not supposed to search for movies, but for questions.
    – Napoleon Wilson Mod
    Jul 29, 2019 at 12:13

1 Answer 1

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TL;DR: This would cause more problems than it would solve, especially when dealing with new users, so no, we shouldn't do this.

Napoleon Wilson has already pointed out in the comments that we can already search for all versions of a film by using wildcards, so you're trying to solve a problem that doesn't really exist. But in addition, I can see three further problems that your system would cause:

1. We can't force usage of the year tags

Say a user wants to ask a question about the remake of Beauty and the Beast. Right now, they'd type "beau" into the tag box, see , think, "Bingo, that's the one", and select it. Under your system, they'll just see the tag, select it, and then not realise that they have to tag the year separately. And if it's not immediately apparent from the question which version they're asking about, we'll have to ask them to clarify, and possibly close it as unclear if they don't.

Sure, we could put something on the "Add Question" page to tell users to do that. But 1-rep, one-time users just don't care. We've done everything we can think of to indicate that ID questions are off-topic here, short of writing "WE DO NOT ACCEPT ID QUESTIONS" in giant flashing neon letters, and yet we're still getting them.

2. Users might not know the year the version they watched came out

So they might guess and get it wrong, or just not put the year at all, in which case (as in #1) we're stuck asking for clarification. Sure, they could easily look it up, but again, they might not know they need to (or might not care).

3. Users might now know there are multiple versions of the film they're asking about

Case in point: I didn't even know there was a 1977 version of Suspiria until I read this very Meta question! So if I'd asked a question about the 2018 version, I wouldn't have added the tag because, as far as I know, Suspiria is Suspiria. I'd be happy to clarify once it was explained to me that there were different versions, but that's still five minutes of our time wasted compared to if I'd seen the tag right off the bat.

So, apologies, but I think this is a bad idea.

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    yup, I see it now, you guys are absolutely right. I'll leave the question here as reference, you and Napoleon Wilson make excellent points.
    – Luciano
    Jul 30, 2019 at 8:08

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