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Proposal: Let's not have an "Is X halal?" tag.

TL;DR: As a solution to the halal/haram family of tags problem, I (tentatively) propose we burninate/blacklist all of the tags: , , , , , , , .

It's a big change, so it needs careful thought, so I post this for voting and feedback. I do some "sanity checks" below, which has increased my confidence in this possibility.

Justification

  1. Tags should indicate what a question is about. Questions like Is X halal? or Is X permissible? are about X, and should be tagged . Questions that are actually about "halal" or "sin" can instead be tagged and .

  2. It feels like a meta tag for two reasons, both listed on The Death of Meta Tags, Jeff Atwood, 2010:

    1. If the tag can’t work as the only tag on a question, it’s probably a meta-tag. Every tag you use should be able to work, more or less, as the only tag on a question. Meta-tags ... tell you nothing at all about the content of the question.

      A question tagged (or some variant) still needs to be tagged .

    2. The reason meta-tags are a problem is that they do not describe the content of the question. They describe some other aspect of the question, like ... what “kind” of question it is

  3. The title of the question should contain something equivalent to "Is X halal?" How this would work:

    1. Title: Sharing videos in website is halal or haram? can be tagged (and maybe we need a tag too).

    2. Title: Is arbitrage betting haram? can be tagged

    3. Title: Are video games permissible? can be tagged

    4. Title: Is it halal to be a makeup artist? can be tagged

  4. The tag is a compound tag, i.e., is has the form where and are also tags.

    Compound tags are going to lead to confusion as to which of the three tags , , and to use. Users might simply pick some random subset of the three. (In the case, we also have too!)

  5. It's impractical. These tags desperately need work, and once we get them working, they will require maintenance. If this is not done, they'll just remain (or return to) being a big and accumulating mess.

  6. There's minor differences in phrasing which perhaps led to the many variants of the tag:

    1. Is X halal? E.g. Is selling virtual weapon skins haram?

    2. Is X permissible? E.g. Is it permissible for a girl to reject a proposal?

    3. Is X a sin? E.g. Is it a sin to accept e.g. food from a relative who supports herself using riba?

    4. What is the ruling concerning X? E.g. What is ruling for Blasphemy in Islam?

Sanity check 1: random questions can be re-tagged [pass]

Here's 5 randomly generated questions generated by DiceStack for various tags:

In these examples, it seems possible to give adequate tags without using an "Is X halal?" tag.

Sanity check 2: meets meta.SE criteria [somewhat]

From the top answer (by Shog9 ♦) to meta.StackExchange question When to burninate:

  1. Does it describe the contents of the questions to which it is applied? and is it unambiguous? Virtually no and No!!! (E.g. using , etc., was defined here When to use haram and halal-haram tags?, but not used like that)

  2. Is the concept described even on-topic for the site? Yes.

  3. Does the tag add any meaningful information to the post? Not really, the question is (or should be) part of the title.

  4. Does it mean the same thing in all common contexts? Yes.

and also

Sometimes, tags get in the way, add confusion, start fights, take the place of better tags... -- Shog9 ♦

These tags seem to be getting in the way more than helping.

Sanity check 3: correspondence with low quality questions [slightly]

Bad tags are often harbingers of bad questions. -- Shog9 ♦

I suppose the logic is "effortless tags" correspond to "effortless questions". Here's some data:

tag            % Q's with
               score >= 3

sin               47%
fiqh              47%
sharia            45%
sin-or-not        43%
halal-haram       37%
islamic-ruling    35%
haram             34%
halal-consumer    32%
halal             29%
haram-halal       26%

history           50%
jamaat            49%
women             46%
food              41%
nikah             39%

There seems to be some trend there, but not that strong (maybe they were deleted though; or perhaps this is more about poorly written questions). Nevertheless, there's examples of bad questions searching for [halal-haram] score:0 is:question. (I just downvoted a whole bunch of these; they should be automatically deleted.)

Prior meta posts

and also

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