I've had a lot of fun answering glyph-origin questions over the last few years, and I hope this community has found those answers at least somewhat useful.
The character system is incredibly daunting for a beginner, and it is commonly accepted that academic subjects like paleography and linguistics are not that helpful to someone just starting, as they can't really see how the entire character system works together with these subjects - they only become useful after a few hundred characters are already learned. To that effect, sometimes I've tried to list other characters which have related features of the character being asked:
- What semantic notions underlie 頁 ('page') with '預' ('beforehand')?
- How does 殳 resemble a hand holding a tool?
- Any ideas on the origin of the 绍 character?
- Is the character 跌 (to trip) a deliberate combination of 足 (foot) and 失 (to lose)?
- Is the water radical sometimes three strokes and sometimes two strokes?
Question 1: Can we utilise StackExchange's tagging system to automate the listing of related characters? I'd imagine that, if every glyph-origin question were tagged with (say) semantic-x and/or phonetic-y, then related characters would be automatically more discoverable. For example, the questions above would be tagged like
- semantic-頁phonetic-予
- semantic-殳
- semantic-糸phonetic-召
- semantic-足phonetic-失
- semantic-冫phonetic-冫 (I know this is from Japanese SE - it's entirely a valid question on Chinese SE, though)
The huge problem I see with this is the number of tags that we'll have on Chinese SE (potentially a few thousand!), and I remember a policy from somewhere that StackExchange encourages a minimum amount of tags.
Question 2: Are there any other ideas for optimising character listing for characters with related glyph origins?