Merge/Split Equipment- Camera- and Lens-Recommendations tags?

Question

There's three tags that seem to overlap:

• equipment-recommendation (937 questions)
• camera-recommendation (40 questions)
• lens-recommendation (15 questions)

Should we:

1. Merge them all into equipment-recommendations (easy, since the other are much less common)?

2. Or use the more specific tags, and split up equipment-recommendations into lens and camera recommendations (hard, if done retroactively, since there's so many to review)?

3. Leave them be, but put a 'see also' or similar on the equipment-recommendation tag to just encourage more specific tagging? (don't think people really read the descriptions)

4. Add more specific tags, like strobe-recommendations, flash-recommendations, adaptor-recommendations, film-recommendations, memory-recommendations, bag-recommendations, for the other types of equipment, and try to put equipment recommendations generally into more specific categories. Could then consider removing equipment-recommendations or limiting it to any recommendations that don't fit one of the other *-recommendations tags.

Answer 1

I believe we should keep all three. I understand that there is some overlap, however there are also one way relationships among that overlap. Not all "equipment" recommendations are lens recommendations or camera recommendations. Camera recommendations and lens recommendations are not necessarily general equipment recommendations.

Furthermore, there is more to photography equipment than lenses and cameras. We also have various lighting equipment, such as flash, flash stands, umbrellas, reflectors, etc. Flash isn't just the only other equipment recommendation...there are also various accessories like battery grips, remote shutter releases/intervalometers, tripods, tripod heads, equipment bags, etc. etc.

Personally, I think we could do effectively the opposite of what you are recommending...go through the near thousand equipment recommendations and add new tags to more finely define which equipment the question is about. It's handy to have a bit of a hierarchy in tags. It's nice to be able to find all equipment recommendations, but additionally it's nice to find specific kinds of equipment recommendations.

So, I guess I'd opt for option 4: Keep the current tags, and add more specific ones. ;)