Tags for biblical books should be consistent and canonical

Question

The list of Tags has very inconsistent names for biblical books. For instance:

• book-of-hebrews
• gospel-of-luke
• john
• james

Similarly, the tags for people are inconsistent. For instance:

• james-apostle
• luke

And combined, they are even more confusing.

• "luke" is the author of "gospel-of-luke".
• "james-apostle" is the author of "james".

There are others that accidentally look like they follow some standard, such as "book-of-life".

---

There really should be standards for the names of books, and for the names of people. (I'd suggest putting a keyword suffix on all book names, (e.g. "-ot", "-nt", "apocryphal"), but won't argue for it; I simply want predictable consistency.)

And this standard should be the canonical tag names for all books, even when there is no confusion between book name and person name.

And after that, it would be good to pre-define any missing books or significant people. Amazingly there is no tag defined for the person "John" other than "john-the-baptist".

Answer 1

Thanks for suggesting this.

book-of-hebrews is just a synonym for hebrews, and likewise gospel-of-luke for luke — try clicking on the tags in my answer to see what I mean. I don't think there is a problem there.

With that out of the way, james-apostle doesn't look inconsistent (though maybe apostle-james would be better). There is nothing in the tagging that indicates authorship — whether the apostle James wrote the epistle James is a authorship question (eg: Who wrote James?).

book-of-life is not something we need to worry about too much — it's currently the tag on only one recent question. Single-use tags automatically expire after a few months so that problem will likely go away by itself.

There really should be standards for the names of books, and for the names of people. (I'd suggest putting a keyword suffix on all book names, (e.g. "-ot", "-nt", "apocryphal"), but won't argue for it; I simply want predictable consistency.)

I know you aren't arguing for it, but you might like to know there is a very strong argument against adding a suffix. Tags are very useful for search engines and we want them to correspond to likely search terms.

And after that, it would be good to pre-define any missing books or significant people. Amazingly there is no tag defined for the person "John" other than "john-the-baptist".

I don't think we need to pre-define tags at all — if they aren't being used then they aren't needed. if in future they are used it will be because they have become necessary. On the other hand if you can find more than one question on the site that could be tagged john-apostle (or apostle-john?), please feel free to create a new tag for them. John the Baptist is going to be the subject of a lot of questions because he is the direct subject of a lot more verses than the apostle John. Because we generally work upwards from the text here, that's probably the reason for the anomaly — though I can see how a question about the authorship of various books might be usefully tagged for the apostle, along with some textual questions.

Answer 2

[...] it would be good to pre-define any missing books or significant people.

Jack already argued against needing these, but allow me to be more specific on this point.

We cannot pre-define tags. Tags may only be created in the context of adding them to existing questions. And as pointed out, there has to be at least two questions with the tag for the tag to stick around. When questions get asked that need a tag, then and only then do we even have a technical means to create a tag.

Tags are a taxonomy, not a directory, and are applied to existing content; they are not placeholders to file new content under.