Split off Linguistics into a site category?
So to be honest, I have basically zero interest in any of the etymology, language usage, or language learning questions here. I'm here for the linguistics questions. And there's really not a lot of overlap between them.
What if we made off linguistics as its own top level category (so next to Resources)? This keeps the two areas of this site community much closer together than they ever would have been at Stack Exchange, but does give space for theoretical and descriptive linguistics too.
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This is one of four (or more) alternative answers.
(I am posting the alternatives separately and simultaneously to allow separate voting and commenting. They represent elaborations of potential courses of action touched upon by comments on the question post. Comments on the answer post can now be used to refine the respective options further; new parallel answers are welcome, too.)
Option 1 - Category based
The current "Q & A" category will be renamed to "Languages Q&A", initially retaining questions existing at the point of the rename. A new category, initially empty, will be created. It will be named "Linguistics Q&A".
The tag set will be shared between all of "Languages Q&A", "Linguistics Q&A", and "Resources".
New users will tend to post to "Languages Q&A" because that will (continue to) be the leftmost, default category. Questions typical for linguistic research will tend to land in "Linguistics Q&A".
We can also move old linguistics posts if this is set up.
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This is one of four (or more) alternative answers.
(I am posting the alternatives separately and simultaneously to allow separate voting and commenting. They represent elaborations of potential courses of action touched upon by comments on the question post. Comments on the answer post can now be used to refine the respective options further; new parallel answers are welcome, too.)
Option 4 - Status quo
"Languages" and "Linguistics" aren't separable categories. "Linguistics" is the study of language, studying both tiny traits of tiny languages, as well as big questions involving many languages; "linguistic" is the adjective corresponding to "language" without any obvious further semantic difference between the two.
There's a lot of gray area between a super-specific question such as "what is the origin of this particular word in this particular language", and highly generalized questions about languages at large.
We don't need a mechanism, or we don't know how to establish a consensual mechanism to draw a red line between "Languages Q&A" and "Linguistics Q&A".
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This is one of four (or more) alternative answers.
(I am posting the alternatives separately and simultaneously to allow separate voting and commenting. They represent elaborations of potential courses of action touched upon by comments on the question post. Comments on the answer post can now be used to refine the respective options further; new parallel answers are welcome, too.)
Option 3 - Topic tag based
We will add a new tag "general-linguistics" and add it to existing questions where it fits. Questions asked about languages of certain properties regardless of their genetic affiliation should be tagged with this tag. The word "general" refers to generalization beyond a specific single language.
Less experienced posters may miss out on adding this tag, if they ask a broadly applicable question; this can be corrected by any user or moderator when noticed.
New language tags can be added by any poster on the fly[1]. The system will not automatically recognize that they are language tags, so they may be visually styled inconsistently with other language tags until reclassified by an advanced user to the proper style.
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At least for now. This will most likely change once abilities are implemented. ↩︎
This is one of four (or more) alternative answers.
(I am posting the alternatives separately and simultaneously to allow separate voting and commenting. They represent elaborations of potential courses of action touched upon by comments on the question post. Comments on the answer post can now be used to refine the respective options further; new parallel answers are welcome, too.)
Option 2 - Mandatory tag based
We will add two new tags: [tag:general-linguistics] and [tag:other], and add [tag:general-linguistics] to existing questions where it fits. We will group these two special tags, along with all currently existing tags for languages and language families, to a new group of "required tags". The expectation is that questions asked about a specific language should tag with that language, or with an applicable language family, or with [tag:other]. Questions asked about languages of certain properties regardless of their genetic affiliation should be tagged with [tag:general-linguistics].
It will be possible to tag with up to the maximum tag limit (currently: 5) of those required tags, i.e., it will be, for example, possible to tag the same question with both [tag:Japanese] and with [tag:general-linguistics] if the question is about a specific language but soliciting also more general or more theoretical insights.
Any uses of [tag:other] will be gradually converted into newly introduced per-language or per language family tags. (That requires the same tag maintenance user capability as the one needed for redefining parent tag relationships, and therefore new language tags cannot be invented by every poster on the fly.)
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