Even more tag cleanup: burials and cemeteries

Question

As I was writing up the Topic Challenge for this week, I noticed that we currently have these tags relating to burials and cemeteries:

• burial has 9 questions and no usage guidance
• burial-records has 3 questions and this description "For questions about finding or interpreting records of burials."
• cemeteries has 10 questions and no usage guidance
• grave-marker has 10 questions and is for "Artifacts or symbols that denote the burial of someone."

I think all of these tags could be useful, but at the moment, the questions attached to each of these tags aren't necessarily questions that belong together.

Here are my initial thoughts on what kind of tagging might be most useful, assuming we want to keep all three of these tags.

Proposal one: reserve cemeteries for questions that pertain to entire cemeteries:

• What criteria should I look for to publish my cemetery records online?

Proposal two: reserve burial-records for questions about how to interpret parish records of burials and the records about individuals created by cemeteries and undertakers

• Meaning of "In Whose Lot Interred: Hugh Sellars" at Menands (Albany Rural Cemetery) in 1872?

• What records might be created in England when people are re-interred?

The tag grave-marker is straightforward enough and is useful for questions that discuss the actual stones or other markers.

Other questions that don't fall under these three tags, including finding records of burials, could be tagged with the more generic burial. (We also have the tag locating-records which could apply to those questions.)

At the moment, the tagging of questions is nothing like the proposal I've outlined above. We have problems like this question:

• How to preserve deteriorating gravestones, and enlist family support to do so?

which is currently tagged headstone grave-marker and cemeteries along with its place.

It makes more sense to me to have a preservation on this question along with grave-marker, and to make headstone a synonym of grave-marker. And I see from the suggestions given by the site that we already have a prior question on that topic from 2013:

• Make [headstone] a synonym of [grave-marker]?

I would like to see the tags bring together the questions which are functionally the same -- with cemeteries noting the questions pertaining to research about cemeteries, burial for individual burials, grave-marker about the stones, and so on.

Please look over the questions we have, and post your suggestions below.

Answer 1

Having thought about this for a while I think it is confusing how for many events we have a sort of "general" tag as well as a "records" tag. While it is simple to re-tag questions with the right tag, it would be better if we could have some clearer names and usage guidances so that questions are tagged correctly in the first place. Therefore I propose the following solution of tag names and usage guidances for these four tags, the main change being that burial should be renamed burial-practices:

• burial-practices: For questions about customs, traditions, and laws associated with interment, including funerals.
• burial-records: For questions about finding or interpreting records of burials, such as burial registers and cemetery deeds.
• cemeteries: For questions about burial places, including churchyards and municipal cemeteries. If the question pertains to an individual burial or headstone and not the cemetery as a whole, use either the burial-records or grave-marker tag.
• grave-marker: For questions about headstones, memorials, monuments, and other artifacts that commemorate the death of a person.

I think generally a question should be specific enough that it only requires one of these tags, however there may be questions in the future that, for example, can have both the burial-practices and cemeteries tags.

It's possible that there will be questions about burials that do not easily fit into "practices" or "records", but I cannot see that there have been any to date, and in the case such a question arises then perhaps it merits its own type of burial tag.

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I think that in the future an associated tag that may be useful to create is cremation (though only to be used for questions specifically about that practice, not for questions generally looking for a burial or cremation record).

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This same principle could be applied to baptism and marriage which I think would be better renamed to baptism-practices and marriage-practices. This would remove some of the ambiguity of not knowing whether to tag baptism vs baptism-records or both.