Should we remove or limit the use of the "belief" tag?

Question

I've noticed a lot of questions tagged belief in this site. The tag may make at least some sense if someone asks a broad question like "What do Hindus believe about cooking?" or something like that. Or where it would be most appropriate would be a question like "What is the role of belief in the performance of Kshatriya dharma?". But people are using it far too often to just tag anything that is related to the beliefs of Hinduism, and that makes it fairly useless, like the "hindu" tag was, because explaining the beliefs of the Hindu religion is part of the core mission of our site. So it's superfluous in most cases

So what should we do? Should we remove the belief tag, just as was done with the hindu tag? Or should we just discourage its use except in the cases where it's truly relevant to the question at hand?

Answer 1

Having 1/6th of the question on a website tagged with a certain tag can seem odd. Now, in other cases, this might be relevant just based on the sheer volume of the tag. In my opinion the belief tag is quite useless.

Let's try to understand the purpose behind a tag:

• To allow people to follow certain topics
• Content management
• Provide more information based on the tag wikis

Considering the belief tag, following the tag makes no sense because it is simply too broad. It's like a program tag on CodeReview.SE.

Almost anything can be tagged as belief, because as a part of religion, most things are scripture based, which by virtue of the word religion means that it's based on a belief.

Doesn't provide much information in it's current state either.

Why should be keep the tag?

Answer 2

I feel believe tag is used by the users even when it shouldn't be used on a particular post, for a quick reference, check the question below

Revision Linked

Now I don't see any good reason of using belief tag here, hence its more like users using the tag in a wrong way rather than tag being superfluous itself.

Belief is nothing but believe, so when user asks questions about superstition, or say a pratha in a particular temple, he may ask why they do that, and here, the tag comes handy, so according to me, the usage should be more precise rather than black listing the tag.

And to make the tag more precise, users should remove the tag if it is not required by editing out the post.

Anyways thats my opinion...

Answer 3

Thanks for bringing this up - this had been bothering me, too.

Let us first observe that Christianity.SE has a [belief] tag and Mi Yodeya has a [hashkafah-philosophy] tag (synonym of [belief]). The tag wiki on Mi Yodeya I think does a good job of describing the appropriate scope of a tag about "belief" - it should be about the philosophical bases of Hinduism, as contrasted with questions about practice.

I think that it is possible to make good use of the belief tag on this site. At the same time, I'm not wedded to it - if people keep on blindly applying the tag to everything, I'm happy to get rid of the tag if that'll get people to use more appropriate tags instead.

Answer 4

I propose that we replace the belief tag with a philosophy tag, because that should encompass most of the questions that can be legitimately tagged with belief, like "What are the differences between the beliefs of the Thenkalai sect and the Vadakalai sect?". And the questions that are illegitimately tagged with belief, like "How many incarnations do Hindus believe Vishnu has taken?" are questions that no one would think of putting under philosophy.