Europe and other continental tags

Question

As of today, the "europe" tag was used with 69 questions. Some of them are added to questions about things that have matter to overall history of the European civilization, while some others to questions about things connected only with particular country, nation, persons or happenings inside of Europe.

I tend to use it whenever I ask about things connected with any European country (if there's still free slot for additional tag), as obviously those countries are in Europe and in my opinion searching for "europe" should result with those questions.

But I'm starting to wonder if I'm right. How should be this tag treated, or other continental ones? How the use of such tags looks in your case?

Answer 1

I would say that we do not use tags to define the scope of a question, but to group questions about similar topics, and to make them easier for enthusiasts to follow. While it makes obvious sense to replace tags with more specific ones as they become available, it doesn't serve anyone to have a thousand tags with one entry in them, either.

One of the problems with a site simply called "history" is that there are many approaches to history. Some have an interest in a time period, others in a particular civilization or cultural group, others in an aspect of human society across time periods and civilizations, others in a particular school of analysis applicable to all of the above. As the site is still in its relative infancy, we lack a complete set of tags for all those angles, (we don't even have angles). Moreover, we are also limited to five tags per question, and there is no way to set up hierarchical relationships between tags.

At the same time, a thousand tags with a single question in each doesn't make it easy to follow questions about the same topic. You subscribed to military but didn't see my question? Well, silly, you should have subscribed to air-force instead. No, wait, to aerial-bombardment. Sorry, I meant strategic-bombing. Well, I wouldn't have tagged it as military, since it's not a question about the entire military, right?.

So, tags like europe are not just for questions encompassing all of Europe, but for questions about topics within Europe that do not [yet] have a more specific tag, so that enthusiasts and experts in European history can have a go at them. Have a question about Henri IV? Great, tag it with france. But a question about the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth? For now, I'd say tag it as europe, until we have a half-dozen questions just about the Commonwealth and can justify spitting it out as a specialty.

Answer 2

I think choster really illustrated the difficulties with tags for a new stack. We simply don't have a large mass of questions in most of the tags. I think intuitively it can make sense to tag a country specific question with the continental tag as well if, for example, the question pertains to something that could affect the continent as a whole. If the question about a country only relates to activities and events within that countries borders, and there is a tenuous link to the rest of the continent it may not make sense.