What's the [rights] tag for?

Question

From what I see, the rights tag has no focus. There are questions ranging from.

• Licensing Rights

• Asylum Seekers

• Traveling for Employment

... The list goes on.

The tag doesn't seem to have a focus. Should we get rid of it, and put questions under more appropriate tags?

Answer 1

IMO the problem is not the tag, it's the concept. I have an understanding of "a right" which, I recognise, is more restricted than the widely adopted "anything that you can get or do by dint of law". The above-mentioned exemplars are squarely within the domain of that broad understanding of rights. I can't think of any question about law that doesn't imply a "rights" tag, though by luck of the draw there have only been 50 such uses. The first step, I think, would be to attempt a Wiki definition of "rights" so as to put people on notice that "No, that's not what rights means".

Answer 2

There is often no single right answer in how to deal with tags, but I generally favor a pragmatic approach.

One of the most useful purposes served by tags on SE sites, in practice, is filtering. Users looking at a list of questions can get instant feedback on which ones they might like to spend their time on and which they might want to avoid, simply by looking at which are highlighted and which are dimmed. That visual information comes from specifying a few "favorite" and "ignored" tags.

If a tag doesn't cleanly describe a topic of interest for browsers, then I'd say it's likely not worth keeping around, even if you're smart enough to assemble an precise definition or even tag wiki for it.