Half the questions on this site are tagged with veganism and I think that's a problem.
Looking at a few other sites on Stack Exchange, we can see that it's highly unusual for a single tag to feature so prominently. In most cases, the most popular tag is used only about 20% more than the second most popular tag. But here on our site, Vegetarianism.SE, the veganism tag is used three times as often as the second most popular tag.
Our site is clearly an outlier, but what evidence do we have that there is a problem?
- There isn't a great tag for people who follow a strict vegetarian diet (ie. "plant-based") but aren't interested in other aspects of a vegan lifestyle. These people are not well served by our current tag structure. At one point we had vegan-diet but that was synonomized to veganism way back in early 2017. Update: Actually we do have plant-based
There is definitely an odd mismatch between lacto-ovo-vegetarianism which describes only a diet pattern, and veganism which can mean many different things beyond describing a diet pattern.
It seems the fundamental problem is that veganism is really grouping together several different concerns under a single tag. Veganism can be a totally encompassing lifestyle, or it can be apply to diet. It's also possible to consider products and services in isolation, without thinking about a whole lifestyle pattern.
If we agree that veganism is too big, what should we do about it? Maybe some questions can be split off into smaller, more descriptive tags. Maybe the tag should be entirely replaced. Put your suggestions into an answer for this question!
