Ok, there's a really old meta conversation (August 2010) that's sort of about this here:
Chilli, Chili or Chile?
When asking my question here I said I wasn't sure what tags I should use.
But it seems that either nothing was done about it or it's again gotten messy. There's no status tag on the question, so I'm guessing no consensus was met. Also, the two tags currently being used have no tag synonyms and no tag Wikis or summaries.
As to the pepper/peppers tags, they have no wikis/summaries either and they're a big mess. There are questions about pepper (peppercorns) and chili peppers, and bell (sweet) peppers. In general, it looks like "pepper" should just be about black pepper and peppercorn (and "white-pepper") should be a synonym of it.
I would like to reopen the discussion (and add in consideration of the four "pepper" tags) and recommend a cleaner, simpler version of the tags:
I recommend that we use the tag chili-peppers for discussions about the spicy pepper varieties and give it an appropriate tag wiki and wiki summary.
- Nothing can be more clear than adding the word "pepper" to the tag to keep it separate from chili con carne.
- It would also make it so that the tag chili-peppers would appear in the list should someone try to just use the tag pepper or peppers (which they often do, occasionally in conjunction with the tag chiles, which is redundant).
- I recognize that in many English-speaking countries these fruits aren't called "peppers" but I believe that, in an attempt at clarity, it will still be understood.
Make all of the various other tags into synonyms of chili-peppers: chilies (36 questions), chilli (17 questions), chili-pepper (not currently used but good to have the synonym in place).
Clean up the peppers tag (59 questions) to sort all of the questions into either chili-peppers or bell-peppers and then blacklist the tag. I did a quick scan and it looks like all of the questions with this tag can be put into one of these two tags. There's no reason for a generic tag unless we get rid of the specific tags and lump them all into the generic one instead (which, I suppose, is an option).
Clean up the pepper tag (there are a couple of chili peppers questions in there) and give it a wiki/summary that states it's for questions about Black/White/Pink peppercorns of the family Piperaceae and make peppercorns and white-pepper a synonym.
Make capsicum a synonym of something... there are only four (quite old) questions and they all seem to be about chili peppers, so maybe that? Though the Wikipedia page for Bell Peppers claims that they are known by the name capsicum in parts of the world.
Because this all largely is a matter of creating tag synonyms (other than point 3), I believe this would have very little impact on the recent activity page. We could further minimize this by making peppers a synonym of chili-peppers and editing the ones that are about bell peppers (most of them seem to be about chili peppers).
In all, this would take eight current tags (that I've found... though there may be others):
- pepper
- peppers
- bell-peppers
- peppercorns
- white-pepper
- chilies
- chilli
- capsicum
and reduce them to three:
- pepper - for peppercorns of family Piperaceae.
- chili-peppers - for spicy members of the genus Capsicum.
- bell-peppers - for sweet members of the species Capsicum annuum.
There does seem to be an argument (largely by Aaronut♦) against the tag chili-peppers but I'm not sure that I understand it.
The rule of thumb for tags is that you never split them. You could add a [
chili-peppers
] tag if you want, but don't use [chili
]+[peppers
]. Anyway, [chiles
] is clearly the more popular tag referring to the peppers; if that's really confusing to a lot of people (hasn't come up so far) then we'll just add a tag synonym mapping [chili-peppers
] and [chilli-peppers
] to [chiles
].
I don't understand why you would map the more accurate tag to the less accurate and more confusing tag (of which there are now two). If someone wants to tag "chili" the tag chili-peppers would pop up as an option.
There was no [chili-peppers] tag, and you should favour using existing tags over creating new ones, and we already had a [chiles] tag. Either of those two would be valid, but [chili] is not because the term, by itself, refers to the dish, not the pepper. [...]
And I don't understand why we should continue to use confusing tags just because they've been around for a long time. This seems like extremely poor policy. I suppose this is in response specifically to a user asking which tag to use, so perhaps it doesn't apply here since I'm asking that we make a change to the tags that are currently used.