As I look over the sheet-music tag, it appears that 90% of these questions aren't about "sheet music" any more than they are about notation, and are already tagged as such. What is the purpose of sheet-music as distinct from notation?
Asking this because I saw some old questions float to the top after having sheet-music applied, but I'm not exactly sure why that was necessary.
In my opinion, sheet-music is incorrectly applied in most situations. I believe this is because the term is common to the general lexicon, and is applied by amateur or hobbyist musicians in places where it would not be applied by professionals, due to the fact that they have access to a larger domain-specific vocabulary (for example "notation", "engraving", "repertoire", etc.).
I think there are questions where this tag is appropriately used, for example:
In light of this, I don't believe we should co-opt the term to be a filter tag for western standard notation (already assumed to be the default if notation is present without any child tags like tablature). I would suggest instead that we limit the use of the sheet-music tag to where it is genuinely useful as above, and if we are in need of a filter tag for western standard notation, let's come up with something different that more clearly indicates as such.
Additionally, we would probably want to edit sheet-music's wiki excerpt to steer newcomers in the right direction of tags like notation, repertoire that they may be looking for in actuality.
There are many ways to notate music including tablature, numbered-notation, lead-sheets, and the standard notation which the sheet-music has been used to represent. The name is not the most clear as any printed music is considered sheet music, but I think we need to separate each specific type of notation as they are different.
Not to mention that the notation tag is also used along with chords tag for questions about chord symbols and with the rhythm tag to ask how certain rhythms should be represented.
Instead of removing the sheet-music I suggest we rename it, but I'm not quite sure what name would fit it better.
[notation][sheet-music] will let you look at only the kind of notation you're interested in.
-[tag] just the same... but anyway I've gone and made my case in a different answer.
Feb 16, 2015 at 3:33
This is not a full answer, but just a guideline I use. If a tag is being misused heavily, I suggest nuking that tag and replacing it with one that is less ambiguous. I would suggest finding a term that fits the legitimate uses mentioned in NReilingh's answer.
Unfortunately, I cannot personally come up with a term that fits all of them. I'd probably divide the paper-sheet-music and digital-sheet-music into two categories.
