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I just noticed somebody had created a new tag. It was only used on two questions, both asked by the same person.

I retagged both questions with , , and .

The first two fit perfect but the last one seemed a bit off. We have a tag for water but it's a bit too specific in its current form, .

Now isn't a great tag name because the best ways to turn bad water into good water require other methods instead of or in addition to filtration. "Water purification" would cover those.

But for our site I don't think 'food-and-drink' + 'tap-water' + 'water-purification' is the best way to divide up the problem space now.

I think 'water-purification' would be good on outdoors.SE but too specific for one narrow part of a small range of related travel problems on travel.SE

Thus I think the best way is to change to and specifically have it cover all clean water / drinking water related problems we face as travellers.

The one thing I can think of is people using the tag for water issues such as swimming. Do we think that's a concern? If so we could go with or ?

What do we think?

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  • Seems uncontroversial then (-: Or everybody's watching something on TV ...
    – hippietrail
    Sep 26, 2016 at 12:22
  • Tap water is not drinking water. Among others, a recent question (travel.stackexchange.com/questions/79127) addresses this.
    – CWilson
    Sep 30, 2016 at 15:32
  • @CWilson: This is not an English language or semantics site. Tags have a limited character length and only need to address the needs of the site. Please show which questions are only about tap water and not about drinking water. The question you have already linked covers both. "water" would be better for this reason but get misused on marine travel and watersports questions.
    – hippietrail
    Oct 1, 2016 at 5:10
  • Hey, it's your site, I was just a lurker trying to help. :) That said, I thought it was a useful distinction, since tags are often confused to be definitions instead of usage clarifications (see meta.travel.stackexchange.com/a/558/47955 for a brilliant answer addressing this very problem). The only small point where we might disagree is in the last suggestion of your question, where some cultures would be hung up trying to fit tap into either drinking or clean. A German asking about how X's water will affect his laundry wouldn't choose drinking or clean, I think.
    – CWilson
    Oct 4, 2016 at 17:20
  • @CWilson: It often makes things overly complicated trying to guess what people will do in the future. In the past we have had many questions about traveling in a boat on the water or doing water-based sports so we know more of those will come, but in five years nobody has asked about tap water affecting their laundry, so it's better to cross such a bridge when we come to it. In the meantime we have tried stuffing synonyms or oft-confused things into single tags before so we could do tap-water-and-drinking-water or tap-water-drinking-water but I think people would dislike those.
    – hippietrail
    Oct 5, 2016 at 2:40

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I'm in favour of renaming to . Although most questions on TSE are about dodgy tap water worldwide, drinking water doesn't always come from taps. Our tags should accommodate this.

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