Tags reorganisation around "forms", "paperwork", "papers", "documents", "documentation", "identification", and "identity cards"

Question

Growing like we are sometimes gaps and inconsistencies reveal themselves in our tags. Sometimes it's better to expand a tag for various reasons and sometimes it's better to split a tag for various reasons. Let's have a think about this group.

Right now we only have two of these terms as tags:

• paperwork
• identity-cards

Some of the others are actual tag synonyms of one of these and some have historically been treated as though they are synonyms of these.

paperwork is older and pretty broad in name and even broader in use.

I've long thought about renaming it to paperwork-and-documentation.

identity-cards is relatively new and very specific. I think it may be unnecessarily specific. Even though I've been splitting other tags like visas into more and more specific tags recently.

One problem with tag names and coverage is how people use some of the terms involved. There can be ambiguous, between, and slippery terms.

For instance I originally chose "paperwork" because it would cover "papers" and "forms". People use "papers" to mean all the paperwork you need to carry when you travel, including documentation. Then "documentation" and "documents" are almost the same but "documents" also tends to have a specific use for "identify documents" and especially "passports" and the less common things used in special circumstances in lieu of passports. We have and definitely need a separate "passports" tag, which is fine.

Going back up the path, "forms" also covers "applications" and of course many applications and other forms are now digital and/or online.

But when talking about documents and documentation in the plural, covering all such things, it's good to have a broader tag which includes but is not limited to just passports.

Then there is "identity cards". Many countries have an actual ID card. Others including my country Australia does not have them and does not wish to have them. Yet we still have the concept of "ID" and many questions about ID work the same no matter if you're using an identify card, a driving license, a passport, or some other card.

I personally feel questions about the actual cards that do not apply to other forms of ID are not a strong enough topic on their own to need such a specific tag. And it leaves a gap where people want to ask about ID where they would use a driver's license or passport or ID but don't know which tag or tags to use. So a tag such as "identification" or "identity-documents" would be better.

But then as you see we are going to overlap with the former group.

I can think of two ways to improve this situation. One is simple and we can do it quickly and develop it from there. The other would require debate and agreement and general interest and participation.

1. Merge most of these tags into a new "paperwork and documents" tag. Then split off new specialized tags from that over time as the concepts gel and we see which really need to be split.

2. Come up with a new larger set of tags to cover these groups of concepts in the best way with the fewest possible gaps and overlaps and ambiguities.

Mull it over and post some comments and answers ...

Answer 1

I think paperwork should be used when discussing the documents and forms which are related to bureaucratic procedures. In my mind this is clearly distinct from the documents that one uses as forms of ID (passports, driving licences, id cards, etc.) and thus the tag should not be used in this context. Moreover I don't usually use documentation in the sense of paperwork, rather for me the term carries the meaning user-guide/white paper/et. Hence I'm not too keen on renaming paperwork to paperwork-and-documentation. How about a paperwork-and-bureaucracy to clarify the tag scope and provide a clear disambiguation with respect to papers being used as a synonym for ID documents? Another reason I think you might like this tag is that both paperwork and bureaucracy are uncountable in this context, and thus must not be pluralised to fit our tag schemes, thus avoiding oddities like paperwork-and-documentations.

I also think that we should keep a distinction between passports and other form of identification documents. Some questions - typically visa ones, damaged passports, general trivia - are more related to passports than to generic ID documents. I would therefore maintain passport as a separate entity. I do agree though that id-cards is somewhat too specific (30 questions in total), and limited in scope. We could rename it to something more general like indentification or forms-of-identification (mouthful IMHO) or identity-documents using the canonical wikipedia definition (although IMHO not that common but arguably the best).

Answer 2

So here's a proposal to address one of the issues. Let's keep each issue as separate as possible to make voting and discussing clear as we can.

Remove the synonym identification from the main tag paperwork.

Make a new tag identification.

If it's possible to just "unsynonymize" these, that works too. I don't have any clue about the dev tools, sorry.

Make the existing tag identity-cards a synonym of it. (We can always split it off again if that would add value to the site.)

The new tag wiki should say it's about identify yourself and the documents required to do so, including ID cards, passports, driving licenses, etc.

The existing passports and driving-licenses tags should not be made synonyms of the new tag.