I found out a few days ago that we have two tags, and the majority of questions are tagged with "birds" at the moment.
Should we change it to "bird-strike"? I would think that if a question mentions birds, it is likely about a bird strike (rather than e.g. aerodynamics of birds). "Bird strike" is a common term where people would search.
I agree that 'bird-strike' makes a better tag for that sort of question. Of the 25 questions tagged with "birds," the following are the only ones that are not related to bird strikes:
How can seagulls slide in the wind without flapping their wings?
When do birds generate more lift? Take-Off or Landing?
What kind of g-forces do birds experience and how does it compare to humans? [closed]
At the time of posting the only one with more than 3 upvotes is the one that is closed. All but one have accepted answers. Maybe we could keep a 'birds' tag that explains it's for aerodynamics, but since those questions don't seem to come often or get great reception, I'm not opposed to doing without it.
As fooot points out, we do have a few questions that are about birds as aviators. Even though it's only 16% of the questions in the tag, I'd prefer to avoid mistagging those with bird-strike. One complication is that a few of the bird-strike questions are only indirectly about strikes: they're about bird control at airports or other related issues.
I'd be in favour of creating a new tag for the birds-as-aviators questions, maybe bird-flight or natural-flight to include things like bats too.
If we do that, we just have to decide what to do with birds. Either we should remove it completely (and re-tag all existing questions to one of the two more specific tags), or make it a synonym of one of the more specific tags. Although it makes less sense as a logical classification, I'd propose making it a synonym of bird-strike, for two reasons. First, only a small number of existing questions would have to be changed. Second, since most questions are about bird-strikes, and people tend to choose the shortest, most obvious tag, it makes sense for the short synonym to be for the most common tag: this will result in fewer mistagged questions going forward.
I suggest having two tags:
bird-hazard
bird-flight or animal-flight
and possibly remove completely birds now useless.
