5

Tag wikis are polluted with redundant words:

  • "Questions related to"
  • "Question regarding"
  • "Refers to the question concerning about" (!)
  • "For questions about"
  • "Refers to the question regarding"
  • "Questions involving"
  • etc.

Besides lack of consistency (even in "question" vs "questions"), I think these words are completely redundant and waste valuable space. Since only questions are tagged, I don't see how it adds any value.

When we look at StackOverflow's tags, they don't usually refer to questions in the first sentence. Questions are sometimes mentioned in the following sentences telling when to and when not to use the tag. I think the first sentence should describe the subject, not be an instruction.

Should tag wikis be fixed?

3
  • I was cleaning a number of these, but some users misunderstood the intent and rejected many changes, so I stopped.
    – JoshDM
    Nov 16, 2013 at 20:06
  • @JoshDM I guess we need a moderator (or someone with 4000 rep) with OCD then. :)
    – Athari
    Nov 16, 2013 at 21:42
  • You shouldn't be able to reject a change to a tag excerpt as "too minor".
    – JoshDM
    Nov 16, 2013 at 22:09

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
7

Tag wikis that only read "Questions about {tag-name}" are redundant and shouldn't even be accepted.

In one rare case I phrased it exactly in the way above, but in this case it was to remove plagiarism from the tag (and I had no better alternative at that moment).
I have made some other tag wikis containing a phrase like this, but further added explicitly what the word actually stands for. In this case I think the phrase can be removed.

If you encounter tag wikis like that, feel free to improve them and remove the phrase. I agree that this information is redundant and should be avoided if possible.

1
  • Agreed. Tag wikis should describe the thing the tag is about in the first sentence of the excerpt -- the text people will see when they hover over it. Going on to give advice about asking questions in this tag is fine, but if a tag wiki doesn't describe the tag, it seems broken.
    – Monica Cellio
    Oct 17, 2013 at 14:18
1

A lot of those phrases, including the name of the tag if it appears as one of the first few words, are auto-removed by the Tags page system.

The best way to identify these problematic tag wiki excerpts is to go to the Tags page and look for any excerpt starting with lowercase. Then edit it.

The problem I've encountered with doing this is when some reviewers do not realize that it is acceptable for a Tag Wiki Excerpt to have minor changes, and they reject the change as "too minor". As I've seen you do yourself, it is best to link to this question in the edit rationale.

Removed redundancy, see http://meta.pets.stackexchange.com/q/404/110

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