Editing questions tagged 'rocks' or 'minerals' together with 'identification-request'?

Question

I see people tagging identification questions with identification-request and rocks (example), or only with rocks.

Consider the following question counts:

• 66 tagged tagged rocks and identification-request
• 105 tagged rocks
• 39 tagged rocks without identification-request

Similar:

• 10 tagged tagged minerals and identification-request
• 36 tagged minerals
• 26 tagged minerals without identification-request

An identification question using only rocks or minerals misses the point, it's obvious that identification-request needs to be edited in.

But what about the other way around?
In an identification question should rocks or minerals be edited out?
I doubt that people asking for identification know the difference.

Note that rocks has no usage guidance yet, neither does minerals.

Answer 1

I think it is valuable to tag a question with both rocks and identification-request. Among the most upvoted identification-request questions, some have nothing to do with rocks:

• What type of cloud formation is this?

• What are these lake-like blue patches in the desert, visible in satellite image?

Although the tag wiki seems to assume identification requests are always about rocks, this is true for a majority but not for all cases. I think the identification requests listed above are on-topic for our site, but clearly the guidelines on how to ask identification request questions are only relevant for rocks and minerals _{(I don't know the difference.)}.

Certainly the tagging can use some maintenance. Most identification-request questions are about rocks or minerals, and most rocks or minerals questions are identification requests, but neither implies the other. Therefore, I think we should use the tags independently.