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I recently noticed the tag, which has 58 questions currently. Its wiki excerpt says:

For questions relating to the general care of a pet, in maintaining an optimum environment and lifestyle for a pet. Issues regarding the comfort and needs of a pet, with regard to lighting, heating, sleeping, supervision; questions that may not be specifically related any topic like health or feeding as a few examples.

That seems...broad beyond measure. Most questions on this site are about pet care; if they were all tagged such the tag would not be helpful for either searching or labeling questions. I looked through the first page of tagged questions and they seem highly random to me. Most should (and do) have more-specific tags about feeding, health, travel, habitat, and so on.

What purpose does this tag serve? Should we remove it? If we keep it, how should it be reformed -- does it need a more-specific wiki, or do we need to do some retaggings, or what?

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  • +1 I agree that it is too broad of a tag at this stage. Changed title to reflect what you're actually asking to conform to upvote = yes, downvote = now for meta.
    – JoshDM
    Apr 11, 2014 at 20:45
  • Actually, I intended the question to just be the question and that people who agree with killing it could upvote my answer. Apr 11, 2014 at 21:08

4 Answers 4

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It's not useful and we should remove it (after making sure that doing so won't leave any questions untagged).

The wiki says that this tag is for "general" care issues, perhaps ones where a more-specific tag doesn't exist. If a more-specific tag doesn't exist, we should look at the question as a case study and decide what's needed, because nobody is going to think to look under "care".

This tag was created in the early days of the site, before we had a significant body of questions. Whatever the original intent, it didn't work out. That happens.

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I think we have two types of questions, generally speaking, and . Behaviour questions ask things like "Why does my pet do this?" while care questions ask "How do I take care of my pet?".

Since you're only allowed 5 tags on each question, I don't know if we want to reserve one of those for either the or tags. I think it's safe to assume a question is about the care of the animal, unless it's tagged with or something else.

Looking at the questions, it seems to me like I could really tag anything with . Even more so, I think I could remove it from already tagged questions without it making a difference. Not like removing the tag from a reptile question would.

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  • Most questions fit into those two categories, yeah. There are also questions about training, competitions, and (IIRC) history. But those groups are all much smaller, but they exist. (I don't think we disagree; I'm just adding to what you said.) Apr 11, 2014 at 15:53
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    Yeah, I agreed, I just wanted to show more support than just an upvote :)
    – Spidercat
    Apr 11, 2014 at 16:04
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We need to evaluate each question in the list, the existing tags, and re-tag each properly.

I see several that could be , , , and even one that's .

On evaluation of the questions in... question, more than three refer to the active... "care" or "management" of an ill pet.

I think there should be some sort of tag for that which isn't necessarily "health" or "maintenance". Revise or create a new tag, (yuck)?

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    Post medical care is a very real subject, I tend to side with your thinking about refinement.
    – Joanne C
    Apr 11, 2014 at 22:16
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It says in the tag wiki: care-tag is for questions that are about care but don't have a specific tag created yet. We do have tags for most care related questions, then use "care" only if nothing else fits. I think it is useful in that job.

Surely you could tag next to all questions with "care", but using it like that would be against the tag wiki of "care".

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    But do people use it that way? How many questions "should" be tagged "car" per that wiki but aren't because people didn't know about it? Is it a useful concept? (Not trying to be argumentative; just trying to push on assumptions, including mine, to see if they're valid.) Apr 11, 2014 at 15:51
  • @Monica - this is a good question. I'll come back to it when at a tabletop pc. Smartphone is not so good for tag-hunting really. Apr 11, 2014 at 16:14

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