I just noticed the tag rationale. It seems to be applied to a random-looking selection of questions whose title starts with “why”. It doesn't reflect anything about what the question is about, or who might be interested in it. It's useless as a way to classify questions. It's a prime example of a meta tag.
At 30 questions, it's a bit big for manual cleanup, that would flood the front page.
Please burninate rationale.
Coming here from hippietrail's new question on the same - I agree that this is obviously against StackExchange's own rules and as such the tag rationale should be deleted.
Going by the rationale of "rationale", every single "why" question could be a rationale question. This falls very solidly as an unimportant, unuseful tag.
However, this causes another problem: as far as I know, there's so simple way of "deleting" a tag or nuke it altogether en masse (possibly why it fell through the cracks first time): the only way is any unused tag is automatically deleted at 03:00 UTC every day.
Given the breadth of random questions it has been used for, it cannot easily be merged / synonimised with anything else.
For what it's worth, I think it just needs a community cleanup of manually deleting the tag from every question and then it should die.
After knowing that I am the top user of this tag, I totally agree that the rationale tag has no rationale. Just saying 😁 😁 😁
I re-asked this question without finding this original. I'll re-post my version of the question as my answer. I may tweak it later:
Six Years ago, our venerable overlords at Stack Exchange had a hissy fit about what it calls "meta tags":
We have also discussed them at least once, four and a half years back:
Meta tags - time to eradicate? (Though the tags we actually discuss are bad for other reasons and are not meta tags as Stack Exchange defines them.)
Anyway, I've just noticed we have a meta tag rationale with in the vicinity of 100 questions.
What shall we do with it?
What shall we do in regard to the Stack Exchange policy against meta tags?
I disagree. rationale is specifically about rules or behaviours which seem unreasonable to many travelers. The highest rated question (about lifting window shades) reflects that kind of perplexion — it seems stupid for many passengers to open the window before landing/taking off, when they'd much rather be asleep in their seats.
Not every why question fits this tag, only those which are concerned with human activities. Why is the moon hiding from me? doesn't fit the bill, for example.
I agree that it is not the greatest tag, but it is certainly useful. Regarding your link: There is nothing subjective about the tag and it can be used just fine on its own.
It is used for finding reasoning (rationale) in to the question-asker strange behavior. Strange behavior is subjective, yes, but the question-asker is looking for clarification. There is nothing subjective about them not understanding something.
The tag is also fine to use on its own, although this will not be common. It is often useable in combination with other tags as this rationale should be about something related to travel to be on topic. It can fit in any question about why we do certain things. It does not matter that those questions can also be tagged with different things. On this SE site we will have many questions that have multiple tags.
It is also useful for searching. If I wish to know why they do X on an aircraft, I'll search [rationale][aircraft] instead of skimming through all aircraft questions or searching 20 times. I wouldn't do that with subjective or beginner though.
I'm not sure why it would be too hard to objectively say when a question should be tagged rationale.
If a question is about why something is practiced by a travel-related entity, then it's a rationale question.
For example:
Why are airlines against the transferring of tickets to other persons?
is a rationale question. But:
Can I transfer my British Airways ticket to another person?
should not be tagged with rationale.
I don't see how this would be too subjective? I think the definition is quite straight forward? Maybe you could give a few examples of questions that are in a sort of gray-area between being suitable for rationale and not being suitable? I'm open to having my view changed.
Awaiting further discussion, though, I'm going to say it's pretty straight forward to know which questions to tag with rationale, and I think we have a pretty objective definition for it (as described above.)
If:
Then I don't see any reason to get rid of the tag. It seems useful to me.
