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Some of the Latin authors have their own tags, such as Cicero, but far from even all the most important ones. I have a simple two-part suggestion:

  • All authors should have their own tag
  • All author-tags should be on the template [author]-[authorname], e.g. author-cicero, author-augustus, author-petronius
  • For quasi names, quasi should precede the name, e.g. *author-quasi-cicero.

As the tags for this question suggests, I would like for the community to discuss this, and do not consider my suggestions to be the final solutions, merely a suggestion. The reason I consider this to be a good practice, is principally ease of searching, particularly when one wants to search for writers that are somewhat more obscure.

So please, friends, discuss!

4

Creating tags

It would indeed be good to have tags for all authors that have a significant number of questions on the site. Whether "significant number" means one or ten is a matter of taste, but I am certainly not opposed to adding author tags to more questions and creating the tags as needed. On a beta site like ours, anyone with 150 reputation can create tags. Some SE sites frown upon creating new tags without prior meta consultation, but I see no issue for our site.

If you have specific tag suggestion, you can always ask others to create the tag for you. You can post a request on meta, leave a comment under the question, ask in our chat, or flag the question for moderator attention. We have so few flags that there is no risk of flooding the flag queue. Once a tag is created, you can go and add it to other questions. If you are below 1000 reputation, your tag edits will be reviewed before coming into effect, but you also earn reputation with approved edits.

Tag names

I prefer to keep the tags concise, so I would rather have than or . However, tags can have alternate names. It is possible to create a tag and merge it with so that the tag shows up when one types "author" into the tag search tool. Your point about searching is a good one, but I'm not sure if it's useful to be able to search for all author tags at the same time as opposed to searching for a single author at a time. Such alternate names cause little or no harm, so if others agree, it's fairly easy to implement.

An alternative solution is to have a meta question for listing all author tags so that they can be found in one place. The best choice depends on what you and others would like to achieve with the ability to do such searches.

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  • Excellent answer. As it happens, I just crossed 150 rep, so I can now create tags on my own. However, in the info for this new privilege, they stated that on some sites, a tag is auto-culled if not used again by an other user within a certain time frame. With authors that either had little production or have little research/interest in them, this could be a problem. If possible (and if this is the case), this could be solved by having anything connected to -author not be auto-culled. I completely agree with keeping well known authors’ names shortened.
    – Canned Man
    Nov 26 '18 at 12:54
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    @CannedMan I noticed that, and I believe I gave you the upvote that pushed you across 150. :) If I recall correctly, a tag will not be automatically deleted if it is used in at least two questions or it has a tag wiki excerpt (use guidance). There's usually no point in creating a tag for just one question. If you find a couple of questions about an author and there's no tag, you can go and create it and edit it into those questions. Unfortunately we have no per-site control over the automated SE mechanisms, so the customization you suggest seems impossible.
    – Joonas Ilmavirta Mod
    Nov 26 '18 at 14:58

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