up vote -7 down vote favorite

Hopefully this site will be great for carnivores, vegetarians, and vegans alike. By using the interesting tag/ignored tag system, vegans can hopefully mostly ignore all the different discussions of meat preparation.

Can we try to maintain the convention that questions dealing with meat are tagged "meat", and that questions dealing with vegan stuff are not? Right now this is violated because there is a question about vegan meat alternatives that is tagged "meat", which is reasonable but would prevent my preferred tags from having the desired effect. Similarly, a question about fake cheese has been tagged "cheese", again a reasonable tag that is inconvenient for vegans. We could use tags like "fakemeat" or "fakecheese" for this.

Also, there is a question about when the "vegan" or "vegetarian" tags should be considered appropriate. Should it be reserved for specifically vegan/vegetarian-related questions (my preference), or should we use it on anything that is technically vegan/vegetarian (like a technical question about coconuts)?

I think it is OK if people forget to tag meat questions or add confusing tags like the ones above, and make vegans/vegetarians responsible for this tagging, but it would be nice if the policy was to preserve such tags once added.

Thoughts?

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Can I get some comments instead of just downvotes? – forefinger Jul 9 '10 at 23:41
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In a meta discussion like this, down-votes are typically a short-hand way for someone to say they simply do not agree with your suggestion. It's nothing personal and nobody's going out of the way to be unhelpful. Looks to the answers. – Robert Cartaino♦ Jul 9 '10 at 23:57

5 Answers

up vote 15 down vote

I appreciate the intention of what you are proposing but the ad hoc nature of tagging doesn't lend itself well to this type of "cooperative, global categorization."

Consider if we asked everyone to tag most posts as vegan or non-vegan. What about high-fat vs. low-fat? Organic vs. non-organic? Raw vs. cooked? Allergenic vs. hypoallergenic? Kosher vs. non-Kosher? Even if we could enforce it, we would run out of tag slots. It would be great if we could effortlessly impose this sort of global categorization of everything. But it is just not realistic. Ad hoc tagging just doesn't work that way.

I would suggest instead, tagging questions that are specifically targeted at a group with an appropriate tag. "Is it possible to make vegan omlets?" would certainly support a tag.

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How do you feel about the "meat" tag being applied to all meat-related questions? – forefinger Jul 10 '10 at 0:13
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@forefinger: I can only express my experience of how people typically use tags. A meat tag will likely be applied to questions about meat ("What is the best meat to add to chili?") But if someone writes "how much peperoni should I put on a pizza?", I have a strong suspicion that very few people will be thinking meat as a tag. You are certainly welcome to "lead by example" with your posts, but (in my opinion) the chances that a large percentage of users will follow suit are pretty near non-existent. That's just my opinion. – Robert Cartaino♦ Jul 10 '10 at 2:45
up vote 9 down vote

I agree with Robert -- this is backwards!

Vegetarian and vegan stuff should be tagged with [vegetarian] and [vegan], not the other way around.

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Agreed; if over 50% of the participants were vegetarian/vegan, I could see tagging the carnivorous posts. But I'm in favor of tagging the lesser of two quantities of something. – JYelton Jul 11 '10 at 21:13
up vote 3 down vote

A 'technical question about coconuts' is only vegan by coincidence, rather than vegan by conscience; which I believe is how most vegans come to their dietary course. Tagging all the coincidentally vegan questions would kind of take away the meaning from the lifestyle choice.

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up vote 1 down vote

If you're serious about following posts in a tag or set of tags, you're far better off using the feeds or custom searches. Interesting and ignored tags work best for increased/reduced emphasis when you're trying to view all questions... but work very poorly if you actually wish to exclude certain topics entirely from the default views.

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up vote 0 down vote

I would be in favor of:

pseudo-meat or imitation-meat

over fake...

But that's just my preference.

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