Creation of a ww2 tag -- pros and cons?

Question

I asked a question about a scene in a movie that not only takes place during ww2 in Vichy France but also ww2 and the persecution of Jews are absolutely central to the film which is Au Revoir Les Enfants.

I believe that the ww2 tag, which is surprisingly to me new, belongs not just on my question but would serve to help attract answers and simply interested readers. I often search by tag and if ww2 was associated with The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit (a movie which takes place a decade after ww2's end but is still very important to the movie which is ostensibly about a writer in the advertising or public relations business in NY in 1955) would allow people interested in ww2 as a general area to potentially discover a film that might interest them and it might also attract knowledgeable potential answerers. I have been very successful using tags in scifi, creating new ones occasionally, but now I am told I do not understand how to use them. By successful I mean I have gotten I think faster and better answers as well as attracting sometimes well over 1000 views.

Finally, what harm does creating a new tag do and what harm does even mis-applying one do? Not that I agree that I have misapplied the ww2 or the Malle tag (I was hesitant about the Malle tag since I thought very few people would search on that tag or even know, at least among Americans, who he is.(

Answer 1

The policy here been to not allow such generic categorizations of the movies and TV show content like ww2.

Look at the existing tags, they fall into the following categories, in what I would guess is roughly order of how common they are:

• Name of the show or movie, and very occasionally a encompassing franchise
• Category of question, e.g. plot-explanation
• Category of some sort of movie or TV production activity, e.g. credits
• Genre, when asking directly about the genre
• Very occasionally a director's name when asking questions directly about their involvement

(there may be others but they will be very occasionally used)

We don't tend to add tags subdividing the subject of movies or TV show, like ww2. The fact that it didn't exist after 10 years of this site might have been a clue. The argument is that to do so would turn the tag system into a free-for all and eventually make it less useful to everyone. They would be inconsistently applied, often not at all, so curating them becomes a task in itself. If we did allow such tags, and it inconsistently returned answers because they are uncurated and inconsistently applied, how useful is that?

You may not agree with our choice of 'schema' for tags here, but it does exist, and adding a ww2 tag would have broken that.

I'm not particularly familiar with the rules on SciFi, but I note they don't have a ww2 or similar tag either.