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I've stumbled upon the tag , which sadly has neither a tag wiki excerpt nor a full tag wiki. Looking through the questions tagged with I can see that most of them (10 of 18) have the tags and .

What is the difference between the two?

It looks to me like we could just get rid of and replace it where necessary with and , as it seems to be a mixture of the genre tag and the format tag . I couldn't find anything explicitly about short-fiction with a quick search that lead me to the Wikipedia article about short-stories or articles discussing whether all short-stories are automatically fiction.

Are there any subtle differences I am missing? If so, could someone update the tag wiki so that the difference can be found more easily and check whether the questions are tagged correctly?

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    I agree; that sounds redundant. See also flash-fiction, which is a separate thing (and has its own tag already).
    – Monica Cellio
    Apr 5, 2018 at 18:53
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    Agreed, we should consolidate or at least make one of these a tag synonym. I'd suggest keeping short-fiction around, since it includes novellas and the like.
    – Goodbye Stack Exchange
    Apr 8, 2018 at 4:23
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    @NeilFein We already have a tag for novellas.
    – Secespitus
    Apr 8, 2018 at 8:22
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    I have deleted the tag [short-fiction] from all questions that explicitly ask about a specific type of short fiction (such as short story or novella) and not short fiction in general as well as from questions where the type of story is irrelevant to the question, such as questions about writing exercises. I have left the tag [short-fiction] in all questions that ask about fiction of less than novel-length in general (e.g. how to sell short fiction). There are now six questions left tagged [short-fiction]. This will make it easier to decide what should happen with those questions and that tag.
    – user29032
    Apr 9, 2018 at 19:16

2 Answers 2

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After Cloudchaser's edit (thank you!), five questions remained with the tag. I reviewed all of them, and all of them were about a more specific type of short fiction (usually short stories). This one about making money from short fiction was the most ambiguous; it refers to publishing in magazines in the past, which could mean short stories or novellas. I retagged it anyway; there were already five tags so I didn't try to add .

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There are many other types of short fiction that aren't short stories:

and those are only the ones that come to mind quickly.

The tag makes sense for questions that are about specific types of non-short-story short fiction, such as One-page tales: what do I have to spit out and what is indispensable?, and for questions that ask about fiction of less than novel length in general and aren't limited to a certain type of short fiction, such as Can I make money from short fiction?

I have edited the tag descriptions accordingly. Please improve.

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