Styling language tags
(Continued discussion of a specific idea from What tag hierarchy and ontology should Linguistics use?)
As you've probably noticed, we have the ability to put style tags differently. For example, the discussion, feature-request, support, and bug tags have a different color scheme from the other tags (and are also displayed before the others).
For context, there are three types of tag styling:
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Required tags: a question must use at least one from a defined set. The four dark-blue meta tags are defined like this.
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Topic tags: not required (a question doesn't have to use any of them), but they get special styling when they're used.
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Moderator-only tags: like the status tags; not applicable here but included for completeness.
I suggest we set language tags as topic tags so they stand out more.
1 answer
Languages already stand out more because they just got capitalized. However, I like the idea to make them stand out even more. There are two good ways to do it: topic tags and required tags.
Topic tags
We currently don't have tags for (genetical) language families. For example this question would be better off with a hypothetical North-Germanic tag than with a handful of specific language tags; to wit, the question even explicitly mentions a North-Germanic language not listed in the tags, and if it doesn't mention others, its answers hypothetically might. It's premature to introduce tags for language families now, but the need will probably come with scale. I suppose that the styling of language tags and language family tags should be the same, because a question will tend to have language tags or language family tags, but not both. (Search for "North-Germanic" tag would find a post tagged "Swedish", and not vice versa.)
The genetic hierarchy should probably remain multi-rooted, such as one tag per language family, with separate trees for (families of) sign languages or constructed languages.
Tags do not have multiple inheritance. So if we ever need other groupings of languages than genetical, such as "tonal languages", "extinct languages", "EU official languages", I suppose that those would be standalone tags, and as such they should NOT be topic tags.
In this way, topic tags versus non-topic tags would have functional implications. (Search for "tonal-languages" tag would not find a post tagged "Mandarin", nor vice versa.)
Required tags
We have some questions without language tags. It is typically because they are asked about all (spoken, written,...) languages simultaneously. There could be a special tag to express that framing. We are discussing a related question here. If we hypothetically end up forcing a poster's decision between language (family) tagging and such general linguistics tagging, i.e., requiring one or the other, we could end up with languages being required tags as opposed to to topic tags; in this case we'd need to include general and other in that set of required tags. The idea is that "other" would be used as temporary tagging only, until moderators are able to add the needed specific language (family) tags and retag the post to them.
If we do this, the "language" like styling would automatically apply to "general" and "other" as well, but they'd stand out a bit due to lower case.
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