Recent discussions about tag synonyms prompted me to check whether we have an emerging consensus about the structure of our tagging system, or whether things are still in flux.
I tried to review all 262 tags (including synonyms) that were in use a few days ago, and some things stood out.
We tag consistently for date, place and technology
By which I mean
Tagging to specify the time period/historical event to which a question relates, either by identifying the relevant century/decade or by specifying a well-known historical event such as US-Civil-War, WW1, WW2 or the Holocaust.
Tagging to specify the place to which a question relates, to the level of country, state or county, city as appropriate.
Tagging to identify a specific technology (e.g. software, website, dna, gedcom) or package/website (e.g. ancestry.com, family-tree-maker).
We're somewhat confused about tagging for events/attributes and sources
By which I mean:
Tagging for an event/attribute associated with an ancestor (e.g. birth, imprisonment, military service, occupation, cause-of-death).
Tagging for the sources supporting some aspect of research.
Some of us tag with the event/attribute etc. Some of us tag with the records associated with the event/attribute (e.g. birth-record, court-records, military-records). And some of us tag with a specific class of source (e.g. bmd-certificates, grave-marker, manifest, newspaper) rather than the more generic xxx-records, complicated by the fact that in some cases generic synonyms have been created inconsistently (e.g. birth-certificate resolves to birth-record, but bmd-certificates resolves to vital-records).
There's no structure that I can discern for tags about the research process
We've got a bunch of tags related to the research process and documenting and sharing the results, including standards/best practice guidelines that I haven't had the time to dig into deeply, but which incorporate concepts such as source, citation, proof, information, evidence, date name and numbering standards as well as research skills & techniques and elements of the research process such as locating-records, interpreting-records, record-keeping, sharing, transcriptions, palaeography, ... Some of these tags are high-level, some of them very granular, some of them overlap.
We've got some very very specialised tags
To take two examples at random, kataster and geneatheology
So what?
All of which is a long-winded way of saying: I think we need to take a step backwards, understand as a community what the purpose of our tags is and then identify a structure that will meet that purpose. Once we've got a structure in mind, we can create synonyms and/our prune tags to move us toward that structure.
Editing note: I deliberately haven't linked to any of the tags to make this more readable, and because I'd like to focus on structure rather than the value or otherwise of individual tags.