Can Literature be an exception for the SE rule that removes single-use tags?

Question

Part of the general network-wide SE code involves automatically removing single-use tags from the system. If a tag has no tag wiki and has only been used on a single question, it automatically disappears after a certain period of time, leaving that single question either with whatever other tags were on it or simply untagged.

Today @Gallifreyan noticed that Literature.SE had 12 untagged questions earlier today, due to this automatic cleanup. This undesired state of affairs has since been alleviated (at the time of writing there are only 4 remaining), but it's going to happen again, and we haven't even found the questions which had a single-use tag together with, say, symbolism or character-analysis.

Please can the "nuke single-use tags" rule be lifted for Literature SE?

We use tags for authors, and (at least currently) for titles of individual works and series. Under our policy that "all literature is equal, and no literature is more equal than others" (as exemplified by our topic challenges), it doesn't make sense to remove tags for authors without many questions. We must have dozens of books and authors about whom only a single question has been asked, and those books and authors have as much of a place on our site (and in our tagging system) as George Orwell and The Sandman. Please let them stay.

Yes, we could (and will, until this is fixed) try to write tag wikis for every new author and book to appear on the site. But this is a lot of work, and may not be feasible as the site becomes busier.

Finally, these is precedent for such an exception within SE: Science Fiction and Fantasy; Movies & TV; Arqade; maybe other sites too. Please can Literature be added to the list?

Answer 1

You're already doing the right thing here by creating tag wikis for tags that matter to you. For perspective: in the vast majority of cases, most tags, as well as the most useful tags, will be about things that have more than one question asked about them, so this entire discussion here is about an edge case. If you want to have a site policy about keeping low-use tags around for reasons that are more about some definition of equality than utility, we won't stop you, but you'll have to do the work of creating the wikis yourselves.

For a bit of history, the logic that allows single-use tags to exist on other sites is nothing more than a hacky workaround. It was given to Arqade before the system had the "wikis prevent tag removal" logic in place. If anything, we should be turning the single-use tag exception off on other sites, now that tag wikis exist. (But we aren't planning on doing that, because leaving things alone is simpler and less likely to cause problems than Doing Things.)