There was a discussion in You Are Here today about what terminologies about cleaning up tags used for visas. Currently, we have visas, visa-waiver-program, and visa-free-entry.
Leave your suggestions below. Vote UP if you agree and DOWN if you disagree.
My suggestions are:
Going by the definition of a visa being "an endorsement in a passport or similar document, signifying that the document is in order and permitting its bearer to travel into or through the country of the government issuing it", I consider entry stamps to be visas too as they are endorsements that allow travellers to remain in a specific country for a limited time. Accordingly:
Use visa-on-arrival for all cases where a visa can be applied for with paperwork if needed when entering a country as well as all cases where an entry stamp is used as a visa. Basically, if there's a stamp involved, that's a visa and deem it to have been granted on arrival.
In case where an entry stamp is not issued, e.g., travel within Schengen member states use visa-free-entry. Make visa-waiver a synonym.
visas are fine, everyone knows what one is.
visa-waiver-program is a special case for the US only, in that it's not a visa, but it still kinda is. However it's almost a different word entirely, if it was just called some acronym, say (VWP) we'd have used that, so I'm still happy keeping the long version.
visa-free-entry - um, what? Oh right, for places that don't. Why not just stick with [visas]? Some questions will be 'Do I need a visa for X given I'm from y?', and others will be 'I'm from y, so I don't need one, right?' and although it's esesntailly the same question, they're going to try and do different tags if you allow both visa-on-arrival and visa-free-entry. I'd keep it in one place for now.
OK, let's revise. Now that I've spelled that out, I'll rephase with my preferences:
visa-waiver-program is special, and I re-iterate that it needs to exist. Perhaps as a synonym to something else. I'll come to that.
visa-required should be a tag. This can be used to determine whether is required before getting there.
visa-on-arrival should be a tag. This is for arriving and getting a visa at the border, instantly. visa-waiver-program should now be added as a synonym for this, but should definitely still exist.
visa-free-entry - I don't like it, but thinking about it it makes sense to keep.
Other tags related to visas which should stay: schengen, eu, free-travel-zone etc. No need to add them if they don't exist, but that sort of thing should be kept for people to search on.
vwp is the airport code for a United States Forestry Service in Bernard, Indiana - so not a likely candidate for a traveller questions.
Commented
Nov 12, 2011 at 13:58
I think what might help is to dig out existing questions and see what characteristics they have. From this we can see if there are major groupings if types of questions and then we can try to characterize each with a tag for which we will have to come up with the best name.
The easy one is the broad visas which covers all questions about visas and about whether you need one or not for a given county.
Now what visa-ish questions do we have where visas is either inappropriate or not sufficient on its own?
Questions found so far:
