Hierarchical tags are now available
We just got hierarchical tags. A tag can have one or more children, and when you search on a tag you can either search just that tag or also search its children. This gives us another way to organize content.
This feature was proposed on the Judaism site; you can see more background there. (This was also a longstanding request on Mi Yodeya, and its absence led to some cumbersome tag names.) This seems like it could be useful here, and we can do it opportunistically: we're not building a whole tree, but in cases where tags are clearly specializations of other tags, we can now link them together.
As a demonstration, I've created one child of the technical-writing tag. Please use this meta post to discuss whether and where we'd like to create other tag relationships.
A tag can have only one parent; this isn't C++. :-)
1 answer
That's an awesome feature and I see quite a few tag families that could profit from being officially recognized as such. Here are some more points that might be relevant to a discussion about this feature:
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We have some pretty broad tags that might either need quite a few children or might possibly need to be reevaluated such as writing, which seems to encompass basically everything on this site, or fiction and non-fiction, which together would basically encompass everything. style is also a pretty broad topic with quite a few tags that could feasibly be seen as children, such as tags about writing styles. It's probably a good idea to check whether child tags make sense or the category is inherently too broad and should be broken down.
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We could probably make citation and writing style related tags such as mla and apa children of academic-writing. These seem to fit the intentions behind making child tags quite well.
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tools is another category where child tags make sense, for example for specific tools that get lots of questions such as scrivener or microsoft-word. There is the question how we should handle software in this case though, or whether we might want to remove either "tools" or "software", though I remember that "tools" can also encompass analogous tools that for example help people make notes on-the-go. For the documentation of software we already have software-documentation - which, by the way, would fit quite well with technical-writing.
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When searching for some tags you sometimes immediately find a few that could be grouped together. publishing could have electronic-publishing, self-publishing, scientific-publishing and independent-publishing as children. We have to be careful about how broad we want to make the parent-child connection though, as there are also tags such as publisher.
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psychology-of-writing often encompasses writers-block.
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figures-of-speech goes with rhetoric and metaphor.
We could query the database for correlated tags and see which tags go together quite often. For now it might still be a good idea to go to SEDE for a first idea about which tags could make sense as a tag family here if we can't easily query the underlying database of codidact. But if that's possible in the long-term there might even be a sort of "moderator warning / notification" that certain tags correlate very often, but are not currently a tag family. This could help identify cases of very similar tags that have been accidentally created and should be merged or tag families that are not formally ordered as parent-child.
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