Do we want to keep the [science-based] and [reality-check] tags?
When we did the initial import from Worldbuilding SE, the [hard-science] tag was handled specially and routed to the Researched Q&A category while removing that tag, but its siblings [science-based] and [reality-check] were left as-is and routed to the main Q&A category.
My personal experience from Worldbuilding SE is that those tags have been problematic in practice.
Should we keep them?
2 answers
[science-based] almost certainly should be removed - I think we can safely assume that a site called Speculative Science is going to require science-based answers across the board. If an post's not based in science, it's probably not appropriate for the site, period. I'd definitely support removing the tag from all questions, and blacklisting it, if that's possible from a technical perspective.
I think we could make a similar argument for [reality-check]. Invoking real-world science should by definition give the poster something of a reality check. We're no longer talking about imaginary worlds (for which [reality-check] may still be appropriate, just referencing to the laws of science in those universes); we're talking about our world. I do anticipate questions perhaps being divided along the lines of "What would happen if [thing]?"/"Is [thing] realistic?", and in that case the latter is explicitly asking for a reality check while the former is not. I assume a large number of questions will in that sense be reality check questions (which we already see on Worldbuilding), and perhaps having an entire tag for a fairly large fraction of the site is unhelpful.
(All of this of course ignores the additional arguments against having most meta tags in general. I wonder if having the additional category of Researched Q&A will show if a category is more effective at delimiting question types than a tag is. I suspect that's going to be the case, but time will tell.)
I would think that, at the very least, [science-based] is implied by this site's scope and doesn't add anything. (I didn't think to ask for it to be stripped on import, but presumably it's not hard to kill.) On WB I believe the rule was that [science-based] shouldn't be the only tag on a question; is that correct? I don't want to create a bunch of untagged questions by removing it; I don't know if that's an issue.
I suspect what I just said applies to [reality-check] too, but I don't know that body of questions as well.
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