The halacha-jewish-law tag

Question

The halacha-jewish-law tag is the most populated by far. It covers more than 400 of the questions, and could probably apply to at least another 400. It seems to me that in its current incarnation, it's so broad that it would never pass the "would anyone want to browse it?" standard I proposed here. On the other hand, it is potentially useful as a way to divide the site broadly into Halachic and Aggadic types of questions.

Should we:

1. Leave it alone.

2. Try to add it to all Halachic questions, past and present.

3. Delete it.

4. Redefine it as only for questions about Halacha (e.g. history of, philosophy of, rules of, etc.) rather than of Halacha (e.g. Hilchot Shabbat, Hilchot Kashrut, etc.) and strip it from all specimens of the latter, past and present.

5. Redefine it only for future questions.

6. Other?

Answer 1

I think 6 ("other"), as follows:

I do think it's useful to have a tag for all questions of halacha: the problem is that there are too many. By splitting off subspecialties within the tag, we can be left with a generic tag for such halacha questions as don't fit any more specific tag. We already have one such specialty: choshen-mishpat-civil-law. We can go through the halacha-jewish-law-tagged questions to see which topics are especially prevalent. If we find, for example, that there are many hilchos Shabas questions, then remove halacha-jewish-law and shabbat-sabbath from those, tag them with a new hilchot-shabbat tag instead, and mention the latter tag on the description page for the other two (and vice versa).

A tag for meta-halacha questions (history of, rules of, etc.) can be separate: halachic-process or some such. Again, linking from one to the other.

The problem with all this is that it's easy to choose a tag without seeing the tags' info pages, so that people will mistag.

Answer 2

I think it should be like (4) - but the exact opposite.
That is, since there are several different categories of questions (seperate from their topics) - e.g. halacha, aggada, history, Torah, Neviim, Gemara, "jewish life", etc - there should be a clear distinction.
There are those who are an expert in one category, but not in another - and there are those that are interested in learning about one but not the other.
(Originally there were several different proposals on Area51, one for each of the above... These were merged here, rightfully so, but there should still be some way to differentiate.)

Questions about halacha, as a subject and not the topic, should be marked accordingly (though I think that other than historical questions, meta-halacha questions would usually be halachic in nature, too... )

In addition, no. 2 is also a good idea - to apply the tag to historical questions - but not all at once, since that would cause them all to pop the top of the list and can drown any new questions...

Btw, while we're on it, the tag should be renamed to halacha, with a synonym of jewish-law (though I believe tags in general should avoid including "jewish" in them - its implicit - in this case it can cause confusion with a potential tag about [law]), and any other relevant synonym or translation.