How should questions dealing with playing cards be tagged, or should they? [closed]

Question

Among things that beginners seem to undertake are programming tasks involving playing cards. (They come up in a lot of school assignments, but it seems people are equally enthusiastic about trying it independently.)

Noticing that a lot of basic questions were asked repeatedly, I thought perhaps it would be nice for there to be a tag-wiki that came up on playing-cards. It could give people basic pointers and a FAQ, and point them to resources on shuffle etc.

But when I looked I saw there were only 27 instances of the tag. Which was a gross under-representation of the number of questions being asked about playing cards!

So as a little late night undertaking that's easy and also part of getting rid of the homework tag, I thought I'd do my part to find questions that were related to data structures...card suits...and printing and shuffling decks. All the things people do with cards, basically. But someone challenged my choice to add it to this question:

Sicstus Prolog: Deck of Cards Query

(Note: His comment there was deleted once I pointed him to this post, so we could continue the discussion here on meta.)

My view is that it is a good tag to use, to enable browsing. If someone is trying to do something with cards in java, then being able to query on both [java] [playing-cards] (for instance) seems to me like it would be tremendously useful. They can branch out and survey the various related issues that come up, due to the visibility the tag (and its tag wiki) would provide.

If the tag is considered not a good idea at all (and why it had so few uses) I would ask the question of whether that calls tic-tac-toe into question as well? I think that if a question is narrowly about "2D arrays" or such then it probably doesn't need to be phrased in "tic-tac-toe" terms, but if it is then the label seems to be appropriate and useful.

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I'd added enough instances of the tag to give some flavor of what it would be like if it were bigger (though there are many more to find). It brings up a couple of edge cases we might study, like someone asking about how to get the right symbols for card suits in HTML:

Special characters in HTML

This is an example of one of the things that might come up in a list with [html] [playing-cards] and let people quickly speed ahead with their learning. This is where I'm talking about the discovery angle: if someone is developing a playing-card related game in HTML and finds this particular issue, then seeing the tag they might browse into it and get some questions answered they hadn't thought about asking yet (but eventually would, and would be redundant).

When should these types of questions be moved to the Game Development site?

Answer 1

playing-cards is a fine and reasonable tag that you should use freely.

While most of the tags on Stack Overflow are related to the technology used in the question, not all are and they certainly don't all need to be.
If there are enough questions for a (non-meta) tag and sufficient interest, then it should exist.

The official guides to tagging, How do I correctly tag my questions? and Why do we tag questions?, don't specify many rules for which tags are appropriate beyond prohibiting meta-tags, which this isn't. A tag without any followers might be appropriate to get rid of, but I wouldn't presume that this would fall into that category.

While trying to have a tag for every domain isn't a good idea, playing cards are both well-bounded enough to not be meaningless, and popular enough to be worthwhile. There's a dedicated Poker.SE site in beta, clearly it's a domain that people are interested in, why shouldn't we accomodate people interested in the programming challenges surrounding it?

And there are programming challenges surrounding it. Here are a couple of articles by none other than our own Jeff Atwood about the difficulty of programmatically shuffling a deck of cards correctly and the difficulty of determining that a naive solution is incorrect. I wouldn't expect playing-cards to have the ongoing volume of questions of, say, javascript, but it's an interesting domain that could certainly support its own tag.

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Slippery slope issues aren't a problem because the supposed negative outcome isn't actually a problem, and there are exactly analogous problems with existing tags that no one objects to. Tags that should be synonyms are a problem, but a minor one that we already have tools to deal with.

Robert Harvey raises the specter of what will happen if playing-cards is allowed:

But don't blame me when a year from now the next "Great Tag Cleanup" post shows up on Meta to clear out [card-games], [playing-cards], [poker], [mille-bornes], [blackjack], [shuffle], [hangman], [codebreaker], blah blah blah blah.

First, what shows up in a "Great Tag Cleanup" isn't a great measure, there were lots of tags in there that shouldn't have been. I wouldn't expect a repeat without a better vetting process. Though obviously it would be nice to avoid being on any such list.

Second, [card-games] and [playing-cards] are just synonym problems. At various points we've also had [csharp], [visual-c#] and [c#.net] and that doesn't seem to have brought the whole system crashing down. I don't see any fundamental difference between those synonyms and these hypothetical ones.

So the real meat is the supposed problem of all these hyper-specific problem-area tags, [poker], [hangman], [mille-bornes], etc. Popularity is certainly not a requirement for a tag's existence (though it helps). There are currently two questions about e107, a free CMS, that are tagged e107. While that tag probably isn't bringing in a lot of views, I don't think that anyone would suggest that it be removed and the information just put in the title. Remember, there was only one question in c# at one point. As there are already many questions about programming issues surrounding playing cards, this seems particularly unproblematic. Maybe it's not useful to have a single question tagged [murrumbidgee-stud], but if there aren't other more appropriate tags it doesn't wouldn't appear to hurt anyone.