Should we do anything about the folklore tag?

Question

As you may have noticed, Mythology.SE has recently been renamed Mythology & Folklore. This does render our existing folklore a meta-tag, though. Does anyone have any thoughts on what to do about this? More generally, how should we be handling folklore questions in tags?

If we remove folklore, should folklore questions go into the same region/culture as the mythology questions, e.g. japanese for all Japanese myths and folklores? Or perhaps we should get japanese-mythology and japanese-folklore?

Please share your thoughts.

Answer 1

If we retag, we should use not use the same categorisation in absurdum.

The largest tags related to such categorisation are greek, norse, and roman. These all refer to specific sets of mythologies, which are also at this point "closed", i.e. since they have at one point gone extinct, there is very little modern material related to them. Some of the material have lived on as folklore, so having similar tags when possible might seem attractive, but on the other hand, a tag like "roman-folklore" is absurd to apply to modern Italy. The norse name is not as bad, but "norse" still have connotations of having to do with the Viking age, not later. Renaming the current tags would be confusing.

I would thus say: use the current tags for mythology (possibly appending "mythology"), but for folklore, use modern countries or regions: scandinavian-folklore or even swedish-folklore. If they coincide, the same name should be used: japanese or japanese-myth and japanese-folklore.

Answer 2

My opinion is no, we shouldn't do anything about the folklore tag for the time being. So far, out of 1072 questions, 53 have been about folklore, and five of those have been posted in the past two days by me. Let's wait a while and then have a look at what range of questions we have got for folklore, and how we might envisage it developing.

By the way, this folklore question made it to HNQs today and has had 533 views so far:

Historic-geographic spread and variations of the children's rhyme "My friend Billy had a 10-foot willy"

That's the most views for any folklore question for more than 18 months. Let's have some more engagement with this field of interest :-)

Edit

This has now been overtaken by the question

What is the world's oldest joke?