Can we make the identification tags more specific and decide on the convention?

Question

Looking at the questions under the animal-identification and identification I think that we could be a lot more specific.

There are two ways to do it, either the identify-this- convention or to keep going with what we have.

Indentify-this

There is a post about the naming convention for the identification tags here,

These tags are called 'identify-this' tags, so I would suggest following the same naming conventions as the rest of the network... This avoids any surprises when folks folks visit here from other sites. Plus, folks can easily 'favorite' or 'ignore' these tags by entering, Ignored Tags: [identify-this-*].

This naming convention can also be expanded to include other areas of identification as needed:

but it looks like it was never implemented. I would like to suggest fully implementing the solution to bring this site up to speed with the other stackexchange sites.

Basically, can we rename

• mountain-identification to identify-this-mountain

• animal-identification to identify-this-animal

and can we create,

• identify-this-bird
• identify-this-tree
• identify-this-bug
• identify-this-fossil
• identify-this-scat
• identify-this-plant
• identify-this-manmade-object

I would like a mod to handle the renames, but would be perfectly willing if everyone thinks this is a good idea, to hand creating the new tags and then tag the questions.

Keep going with what we have

The second would be to continue what we have and make more specific tags in line with the animal-identification

• bird-identification
• tree-identification
• bug-identification
• fossil-identification
• scat-identification
• plant-identification

I this case I could just create the new tags and apply them.

None of these tags would be artificial as I know of specific questions that could use them.

Answer 1

I think that we could be a lot more specific

So tags main role is to group similar questions together, mainly for SEO purposes. Search engine bots like a way to group pages together so that they can understand that their related. This also aids with the good questions bubble to the top ethos, i.e. bubble to the top of what.

Now with the above in mind, how does being more specific help? at the moment the animal-identification has 46 questions and identification has 30. Making this grouping more specific is just going to scatter the information and likely lower the SEO value. If we had a lot more questions in these subjects and they needed further sub dividing then this would make sense. As it stands I don't think it does. So we shouldn't change these tags or re-tag the questions tagged by them.

Answer 2

I like "something-identification" much better - in my opinion "this" is purely noise. According to the linked Q&A the "identify-this-something" pattern is a network thing, but e.g. biology.SE doesn't adhere to it. So I wouldn't change anything unless there is some requirement imposed.

I don't think we need or should create new tags "artificially in advance", that should happen naturally with questions coming up about the topic.

EDIT: My main point is about it being unnecessary to decide on a big tag change. I do not oppose these tags. They seem totally reasonable. So if there is a question that comes up and fits into such a category, just create the tag. If it is useful, it will be used again, if it is useless, it wont be used - either way, no harm done.