Question on the tagging policy on World of Darkness questions

Question

Two points in the following topic left me a bit confused and I'd like a clarification:

Start retagging the WoD questions! (aka "Editors: the Retaggening")

First, there's world-of-darkness. Apply this to any questions which are about the World of Darkness line of games and settings in general. This tag may get used, it may not.

This, to me, implies that any vampire-the-masquerade question should also be tagged world-of-darkness. But there is this passage

Do not use this tag for questions asking about a specific World of Darkness edition. It's redundant in those cases. Save your limited 5 tags for something else; you will already be using at least 2 of them on an edition and game.

Does that mean that vampire-the-masquerade does not require world-of-darkness or is it more like vampire-20th-anniversary does not require it?

Answer 1

That tagging proposal was written in 2014. World of Darkness tagging was updated again in 2015, making that 2014 tagging schema out of date as a reference.

In the 2014 proposal (which I wrote) the idea was:

• world-of-darkness as a whole-of-series tag, which in turn contains
  • old-world-of-darkness
  • new-world-of-darkness
  • new-world-of-darkness-2e

And yes, the schema was to tag old-world-of-darkness vampire-the-masquerade at the time. Tagging series plus edition isn't something we do for D&D questions, but that's a D&D-specific tagging policy that doesn't extend to any other games, where we will frequently tag with both the series and the edition to aid discoverability according to what makes sense at the time.

Then in 2015, Onyx Path did some rebranding: Old World of Darkness was rebranded to Classic World of Darkness, and New World of Darkness 2e became Chronicles of Darkness. During 2015 we needed to update tagging to reflect this: Changing [new-world-of-darkness-2e] to [chronicles-of-darkness]

I believe Jadasc's proposal was adopted, so now there's:

• world-of-darkness for Old/Classic World of Darkness
• new-world-of-darkness
• chronicles-of-darkness for what was previously New World of Darkness 2e

... and no series tag at all.¹ So now world-of-darkness is a game tag you use when asking about the Old/Classic edition, and that second quote in the question saying “Do not use this tag for questions asking about a specific World of Darkness edition” no longer applies.

This means if you're asking about vampire-the-masquerade, which is also an Old/Classic World of Darkness game, you now tag it world-of-darkness vampire-the-masquerade.

(1: Not having a series tag is weird to me, but I'm not a World of Darkness player and maybe it makes perfect sense to those who do play it, and the taxonomy is for them not me.)

Answer 2

I believe you are misinterpreting the purpose of the world-of-darkness tag. I am not familiar with the game(s), but if vampire-the-masquerade is a strict subset of world of darkness, then the correct tagging behavior is almost never use both tags on a single question.

Specifically, the first block quote states "questions which are about the World of Darkness line of games and settings in general". This does not mean "Any question which is about any game or setting in the World of Darkness line", but rather "Any question which cannot be narrowed to a single game or setting". For comparison, look at the dungeons-and-dragons tag and the dnd-5e tag; even though dnd-5e is a subset of the overall Dungeons and Dragons line, it has far more questions because most questions are about a specific edition. Indeed, if you look at questions with both tags you will find an even smaller number, and many of them were simply closed before the tags could be corrected.

The primary reason to include both the general tag (i.e. world-of-darkness) and the more specific tag (i.e. vampire-the-masquerade) would be if you're asking a question that also involves another World of Darkness game that you're comparing to Vampire. Even in that situation I still would rather list only the relevant games without tagging world-of-darkness as a whole, except if the tag limit would be reached in which case I would switch to world-of-darkness alone without any of the specific game tags.