Do we have a blurry scope?

Question

When building the base of 'the guide to wonderland', I've looked through the scope and site-policy tags. But I don't really know what the difference is, and I'm unsure why a significant amount of them are about a specific-question.

1. Something being on/off topic is part of site policy.

   Why is this site-policy but this is scope.

2. There is no distinction about:

   1. Changing site policy. ¹
   2. Using site policy. ²

   
   Given the above two examples, you may say specific-question is the distinction, but it's not included in all questions, and shouldn't be added in others.

3. Some questions don't have either site-policy or scope. And so it's not clear what to search for these questions, or what I should tag them as when I do find them.

Should we change our tags?

Answer 1

Puts "normal user hat" on.

The difference is easy to state and hard to communicate:

• scope is about the "On Topic" page in the help center
• site-policy is about scope and all the other rules that govern Code Review, whether that's the ban on answer-invalidating edits (which is specific to CodeReview) or the Code of Conduct (applying to all sites in the StackExchange Network)

This implies that site-policy is much more comprehensive and broad than scope. I would assume that the specific tagging query you have is not something that has a deeper meaning.
All the users on meta are also just humans, sometimes we use tags incorrectly ;) I wouldn't take the status quo of any meta question's tags as gospel.

---

Considering the question about the distinction between changing and applying site-policy (including scope), I don't really see an issue...

Any question that is about how policy was applied implicitly asks for the policy to be changed. This also works vice-versa. Any question that asks for a change in site-policy directly wants to change how these policies are applied.
In fact: Site Policies and their application are inextricably intertwined. Only by application does a site policy manifest.

This is somewhat similar to the idea of a law only being a law if it's enforced by someone.

As such I think that the problem you've spotted can be alleviated by updating the tag usage guide and retagging relevant questions.

I would not consider these tags to be overlapping enough to warrant merging. I could get behind removing the overarching site-policy-tag and replacing it with more specific tags, though I think the tag has a lot of merit as a search help.

Answer 2

Why is this site-policy but this is scope.

Site-policy is wider than scope, but both are common enough terms that I understand why both are in use. However, I don't think it makes sense to make a distinction between the two in the tags so I support your proposal to synonimyze with site-policy as the wider master.

There is no distinction about: Changing site policy. 1 Using site policy. 2

And we should fix that by simplifying the tags, not creating more of them.

Given the above two examples, you may say specific-question is the distinction, but it's not included in all questions, and shouldn't be added in others.

If specific-question is the distinction, than that tag, specific-question, is doing it's job. That has little bearing on the rest of the tags used, they have their own jobs, so I don't see a problem with this in regards to synonimizing.

Some questions don't have either site-policy or scope. And so it's not clear what to search for these questions, or what I should tag them as when I do find them.

Tricky. In part this can be determined by looking at the answers, but that has it's own pitfalls. Synonimizing would at least fix part of the problem, since we no longer have to decide which of both it is: pick the master tag.

Answer 3

1. I think changing and using site policy should be two different tags. This is as on meta there are only 4 tags available, and having these take up two of these remaining slots means that these questions would have two remaining slots. I think this is very limiting.

   This would also encourage picking either or, I've not seen any questions simultaneously changing site scope and challenging a ruling.

2. I want to be able to have links in the guide to wonderland that link to questions where these rulings are used. And so something like [broken-code][ruling] would list questions around the broken code rulings. Where if you want to see the different proposed rules you could do [broken-code][rule].

   I've used rule and ruling to show the distinction between changing and using the rules. I don't know of a good similar name in regards to the name site policy.

---

And so I think:

1. Synonymizing: master site-policy <- synonym scope.
2. Add a new tag site-ruling.
3. Update old questions to use site-ruling instead. (I have a list)

Usage would be:

• Changing policies: site-policy
• Rulings on policies: site-ruling