Proposal: Magic: The Gathering
Draw3Cards currently has 557 tags about Magic mechanics, sets, etc. Could this be integrated into the Board & Card Games SE sites, or is this enough to warrant a new site for a Magic: The Gathering SE site?
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go make a MtG site please, I would be more interested in that than B&CG– prusswanJan 11, 2012 at 7:54
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3 Answers
Right now, D3C—a SE 1.0 site—has 558 tags. But…
There isn't necessarily a 1-1 correlation between tags on a SE1 site and a SE2 site. A major factor in that are synonyms (new in SE2), which helps a site do without a fair number of tags. Does a MtG Q&A site really need separate tags for tap, tapped, and tapping?
D3C has a large number of single-use tags—over 200 of them. If a tag is only ever used once, chances are it's not a very useful tag.
D3C has a large number of meta tags, which are not welcome on SE2 sites. Looking at their most-commonly used tags, many of those near the top wouldn't be allowed, such as "humor" and "newbies."
Many of D3C's tags can only apply to questions that would be closed on a SE2 site; e.g., "subjective" and "speculation."
Many of D3C's tags can only apply to questions that would be on a SE2's site Meta; e.g., "meta," "moderator," and "faq."
Many of D3C's tags can apply to other games besides MtG; e.g., "rules" and "strategy."
Right now, Stack Overflow has nearly 30 thousand tags (not counting a couple of thousand synonyms). The SE platform can handle a lot of tags without breaking a sweat.
And so on…
The end result is that 558 tags may sound like a lot, but nowhere near that many would actually need be added.
So (finally) to answer your question:
Does MtG require so many new unique tags that bcg.se can't handle them all?
In my opinion, no—not even close.
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You understood well what I was trying to ask. Currently the Board & Card Games SE has 295 tags. Would there be anything wrong in adding for example 200 Magic related tags?– MarceloOct 3, 2011 at 14:21
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2@Marcelo - nothing wrong at all, as long as there are enough MtG questions to warrant so many tags. Oct 7, 2011 at 1:52
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1While most of your points are valid, some are just squirms: the meaning of the "rules" tag on D3C is very different than its meaning in B&CG (personally I can't understand how such a tag can be applied to different games, except maybe to characterize questions about games that change their own rules such as Magic, Dominion, Nomic etc.). And while there's no doubt that the platform won't choke on several hundred tags, the question was about the community: in a site that has <300 tags for all its different games, adding ~200 tags for a specific game could be overwhelming.– AvishOct 16, 2011 at 9:50
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So IMO the answer to your last question is YES: even after removing duplicates, synonyms, subjective and meta tags, my impression is that MtG requires more tags than bcg.se can comfortably allow for a single game.– AvishOct 16, 2011 at 9:51
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@Dori, I don't understand your last comment. I never said it's a SE limitation, in fact I was quite clear in saying that the platform can probably support this many tags without even breaking a sweat; but also that I think the real question isn't about what the platform can support but rather about whether that's enough to warrant a separate site (see my answer below). I provided my opinion, which is different from yours, but being opinions I think they're allowed to disagree. Do you think I was wrong to provide my opinion and supporting arguments for it? If so, I'd like to understand why.– AvishOct 17, 2011 at 10:39
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1@Dori -- that's news to me; the impression I got from the suggestion page was different (mainly because of this question and Pat's "Board Games is ready for your questions"). If that's the case then yes, these discussions are irrelevant.– AvishOct 17, 2011 at 10:55
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@Dori: Good answer! I've never heard about SE1 vs SE2; is there a site where I can read more about SE versions? Thanks Oct 20, 2011 at 1:54
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Tap, tapped, and tapping are significantly different enough that they require their own tags. Perhaps tap and tapping could be combined, but tap and tapped shouldn't be.– corsiKaJan 14, 2012 at 21:04
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Extremely late to the party, but SE2 refers to this Area51 method of creating new sites, while SE1 is what came before it. This old blog entry that announces Area51 explains most of the historical background and key differences.– IxrecApr 5, 2015 at 13:50
Instead of trying to guess whether or not MtG content would be welcomed on B&CG, why not find out? Ask good questions there, tag them in a way that's consistent with the site's expectations, and see if that meets your needs. If you run into a problem with the way your tag requests are handled, try to work it out on meta.bcg.
If after all that, you don't feel that B&CG is handling your content the way that you had it on D3C, then you'll have evidence that Magic questions may not work well on that site. (You may want to separate issues that are specific to B&CG from issues with SE sites, though ... it may turn out that it's not possible to fit D3C's content into a SE 2.0 site.) And if it doesn't come to that, you may find that whether or not there's support for a standalone 2.0 site, you'll have a home for those questions on an existing 2.0 site.
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Right. By "fit D3C's content into a SE 2.0 site", I mean only "asking questions that also exist on D3C". No import implied or expected. Oct 20, 2011 at 10:48
Looking at the tags on B&CG, the vast majority of them are tags for a specific game ("dominion", "magic-the-gathering"), while the rest are abstract concepts that might apply to all games ("strategy", "rules", "house-rules").
Compare this to D3C, where all the tags, by definition, define specific elements of the single game: tags for different sets ("Innistrad", "M12"), different variants of the game ("commander", "two-headed-giant"), the myriad different mechanics in a continually-growing list ("unblockable", "sacrifice", "level-up", "poison"), tags for steps of the game ("declare-attackers", "combat"), and tags for specific concepts of the game ("deckbuilding", "card-advantage"), among others.
While these can all be added to B&CG, they only have meaning in a discussion about M:tG and would otherwise "pollute" or at least seem out of place in B&CG's list of tags. Certainly they can't be applied to other games (even if another game has a notion of poison, it means something entirely different than what it does in Magic).
The point here isn't the number of tags, but rather that this wealth and depth of topics represented by the tags on D3C is a strong indicator that MtG deserves and needs its own site.
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4It isn't the number of tags that indicate that a particular topic is popular, but the number of questions in tags about a particular topic. Tags are not the content that really matters. It's the questions and answers that really matter. Tags are just a way to organize. I can have a billion filling cabinets, each with 1 document in it, but that doesn't mean I have billions and billions of useful bits of information.– cdeszaqOct 20, 2011 at 13:51
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2I think there will be far more cross-over of tags than you would expect, especially if they are used correctly. "Deckbuilding", "rules", "sacrifice" and "combat" for example can work quite well for a variety of different games, even though they have different specific meanings within those games. Why couldn't you have a "poison" tag that would work for MTG and some other random game that uses the concept differently? The point of the tags is for someone to be able to filter to find specific types of questions. "[MTG] + [Poison] + [Innistrad]" would still be a valid filter.– BeofettNov 4, 2011 at 19:54