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Recently I encountered a tag wiki that was edited to have information about two different games from two different publishers and the edit was approved. There is currently an edit suggestion that is to correct the situation by creating a new tag for the second game. The tags in question are and .

When a tag edit is suggested that is combining multiple unrelated items into one what is the proper procedure for fixing them?

The edits in question are:

https://boardgames.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/14579

https://boardgames.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/14580

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    I wish I'd seen this meta post before. I created evolution-origin and retagged the new question pretty much on autopilot. One tag for two games seemed harmful so I acted quick to prevent further harm.
    – freekvd
    Commented Jan 11, 2016 at 15:23
  • @freekvd This meta post was created in response to the tag being edited for two games and the work that was done to fix the error. I figured it would be a good thing to bring up for the future.
    – Joe W
    Commented Jan 11, 2016 at 15:24

2 Answers 2

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In general, a tag should not refer to two separate games, especially if those games are completely unrelated. So, an edit that makes a single tag refer to two different games is incorrect, and if such an edit is made, it should be rolled back like any other incorrect edit.

In this particular case, we have an unusual situation where a new game has a stronger claim to an existing tag than the current game does. In this case, we have a few reasonable options:

  1. Tag the new game with , or something similar. This would mean that the tag name is an artifact of the order in which the tags are created, which is suboptimal but workable.
  2. Tag the new game with , then have the moderators rename -> and -> . This would make the tags more closely match the game titles, but it's more of a pain to implement.
  3. Tag the new game with and retag questions about the old game to , then update the tag wikis to match. This has the downside of having the tag wikis be temporarily incorrect.
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    It looks like there are a grand total of three questions tagged, so we can easily retag everything to get the desired state without needing synonymization. Also for completeness, the tag wiki excerpts should probably have something like "for Evolution: The Origin of Species, see evolution-origin".
    – Cascabel
    Commented Jan 9, 2016 at 0:51
  • That would definitely work too. The primary benefit of my suggestions is that they don't have the period between retagging and the tag wiki corrections getting approved when the tag wikis are incorrect. Of course, for such low volume tags, it doesn't really make much of a difference.
    – murgatroid99 Mod
    Commented Jan 9, 2016 at 1:00
  • We can edit tag wikis directly (you only need 4k rep) so there's not really much delay to worry about. I'd have done it already if I were sure which tags we wanted.
    – Cascabel
    Commented Jan 9, 2016 at 1:04
  • Oh, I thought you also needed a specific minimum score in the tag to edit the tag wiki without review.
    – murgatroid99 Mod
    Commented Jan 9, 2016 at 1:54
  • 4k users have a lot of extra priviliedges.
    – Pat Ludwig Mod
    Commented Jan 9, 2016 at 5:56
  • FWIW, I wouldn't change an existing tag to refer to a newer game unless there was a much larger amount of questions for the newer game.
    – Pat Ludwig Mod
    Commented Jan 9, 2016 at 5:58
  • @PatLudwig I would have to agree with not changing an existing tag.
    – Joe W
    Commented Jan 10, 2016 at 20:16
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In a case like this where a tag is edited to add a second game, or if another game has a better claim to the tag the following steps should be done to solve the issue.

  1. In the case of a tag edit it should be rejected/rolled back as needed
  2. A post on wiki should be made describing the issue and listing the reasons for which game should get the original tag and which should get a new tag. It could also be that both games get a new tag. With preference being given to the first game to have the tag and also considering the number of questions for each game.
  3. After a consensus is made any changes to the old tag should be worked on by the community (moderator also depending on size of work) and new tags should be created and put on the needed questions.

I think this path will help in the future when multiple games could lay claim to the same tag.

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