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This comes out off a topic in chat. I don't see how this has a place. Being as we couldn't agree I'm opening it out to the wider community to vote on.

The tag is just misleading and it's wiki:

Questions about dinosaurs

Is just confusing. We don't want questions about dinosaurs. That makes no sense. Do we want people asking "What a T.Rex ate"? What do dinosaurs have to do with "The Outdoors"?

So the person who created the tag has re-tagged everything to .....

Same argument applies...

3
  • The downvoter is welcome to add a conflicting answer as to why we should keep the tag dinosaur?
    – user2766
    Apr 24, 2018 at 15:46
  • 1
    Does the photography tag mean that photography is on topic here instead of the stack dedicated to it? Apr 24, 2018 at 17:36
  • We should also consider having "dinosaur" and "dinosaurs" be synonyms for whatever tag folksonomy we decide on Apr 25, 2018 at 12:36

4 Answers 4

4

Yes re-tag all questions as . All the dinosaur questions are asking about fossil records and fossil is much more clearly on topic for this site.

3

No, instead change to something more general, such as "paleontology", and add tags to the questions mentioned.

Furthermore, other SE sites employ a similar tactic, using a tag "paleontology" as a catch-all for these kinds of questions:

https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/paleontology

https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/paleontology

https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/palaeontology

2
  • Its not a problem to have both narrow and broad tags on a question, we have both robins and birds on the same questions Apr 24, 2018 at 18:14
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    Biology ues both Dinosaur, Fossil and Paleontology tags, while Earth Science uses just Paleontology and Fossil. TGO scope/focus is going to be closer to Earth Science then Biology on these type of questions. I like your proposal and reasoning. I also note you are the author of the best answers to questions being discussed. Your suggestion has my vote. Apr 25, 2018 at 12:25
2

No there are many types of fossils.

The suggestion to merge/re-tag into is like suggesting merge/re-tag and into [tag:living_things], then of course we would need a second tag... [tag:Dead_things] and we could delete all the other tags.

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    I don't concur that merging dinosaur and fossil is akin to merging animals and trees. This site is about the outdoors, so discussions on paleontology should be rare enough to fit under a single tag. For example, what about trilobites? We would need a new tag. And another for pteradons, and another for plesiosaurs, and... Apr 24, 2018 at 16:40
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    Happy to have multiple fossil tags is required but dinosaur still make no sense to me fossil-dinosaur would be more appropriate as it doesn't imply dinosaurs are on topic.
    – user2766
    Apr 24, 2018 at 16:53
  • 1
    I say happy to have multiple fossil tags in that I think it's better than dinosaur...
    – user2766
    Apr 24, 2018 at 16:54
  • So maybe we need an answer here that says tag as 'dinosaur_fossils'? Apr 24, 2018 at 17:13
  • 2
    @JamesJenkins We have a dogs tag, but that doesn't mean that all questions about dogs are on topic. I would say the same for dinosaurs Apr 24, 2018 at 17:20
  • extinct species.
    – ab2
    Apr 25, 2018 at 0:54
  • @ab2 or extinct animals? Apr 25, 2018 at 8:50
-3

Let's start with why these questions are on topic

Regarding why it needs to stay even though some questions about dinosaurs might be off topic look at these questions,

Current naming convention for animals into which fits right in.

There is a convention that both the broad and the specific tags get used until a tag gets to a certain size. For example and are both but they are big enough to stand on their own while is not. Not being big enough to stand alone however, isn't reason to burn a tag.

In this case, I don't care if is added, even though is already there.

I firmly want to stay.

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  • 2
    If dinosaurs were extant I would agree, but finding a robin in the wild is much more likely than finding a dinosaur track. As outdoorsmen, we routinely interact with birds and deer and bears and turtles and robins, but it's more rare to come across a fossil. Apr 25, 2018 at 12:41

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