Somebody just created a "safrut" tag in addition to the "safrus" tag we already have. Should they be made synonyms or just replace safrut with safrus in the two questions that have that tag?
More generally, I know we have a policy on transliteration, but how does it apply to tagging?
Yet more generally does this imply that most of Mi Yodeya's sofrim are ashkenazim? :)
I agree with most of Monica Cellio's answer. However, since (apparently) the autocomplete feature didn't work properly, or something else made a user choose the tag safrut despite the existence of safrus, I think we should make the one a synonym of the other (and hence make the newer one a synonym of the older one) lest that happen again.
When you start to type "safrut", you should be offered "safrus" as a completion before getting to the end. Maybe the person who did it was on a slow connection and didn't get the suggestion in time, but in general, for a final-letter difference I think we can just retag -- we don't need a synonym IMO.
Transliteration on the site is all over the map (so to speak); whoever creates the tag gets to pick one and after that we aim for findability. We could be more consistent in some ways than we are -- for example, I'd rather see "parshat-X" for all the parshiyot, some of which follow that form and some of which just use the name -- but it's never seemed quite important enough to sit down and do all the work. So, we live with inconsistency and imperfection.
As for Mi Yodeya's sofrim, I don't know how many we have or what the distribution is, but absent a reason to think otherwise, I'd guess it's similar to the distribution of Yodeyans in general. Those of us who don't use Ashkenazi pronunciation are used to disappointment. :-)
