We need to start documenting Ethereum Stackexchange. Let's start with the tags and create descriptions and wiki entries!
How?
- Start with the excerpt / description. That's the part of the tag wiki that users will see first, and the only part that most users will see at all. The excerpt should define, in a few short sentences, what questions using the tag should be about.
- Sometimes, however, it's easier to start by writing a one or two paragraph description of the tag for the full wiki, without having to worry about length constraints or lack of Markdown, and then condense this down to the excerpt. That's a perfectly fine way to work, too.
- Don't copy content written by others without attribution. Often, it's tempting to just copy a definition of the tag subject from, say, the Wikipedia article on the topic. This can be acceptable, if the material you copy is either licensed under a free license compatible with ours (like Wikipedia is) or short enough to qualify as fair use, but only if you attribute it properly.
- Update the answer below to update the tag documenation status. Feel free to add your name to tags you are working on or tags you finished writing wikis for.
- Discuss malformed tag names, tag merges, tag synonyms, and anything else worth discussing in a separate thread and link it here.
On the Stack Exchange blog, Jeff Atwood writes:
"Here’s a few words of advice on writing tag wiki excerpts:
The excerpt is the elevator pitch for the tag. You only have ~500 plain text characters for the excerpt, so don’t feel obligated to cover everything in it! Save that for the 30,000+ character Markdown tag wiki. The excerpt should define the shared quality of questions containing this tag — boiled down to a few short sentences.
Avoid generically defining the concept behind a tag, unless it is highly specialized. The “email” tag, for example, does not need to explain what email is. I think we can safely assume most internet users know what email is; there’s no value in a boilerplate explanation of email to anyone.
Concentrate on what a tag means to your community. For “email” on Server Fault, mention the server aspects of email including POP3, SMTP, IMAP, and server software. For “email” on Super User, mention desktop email clients and explicitly exclude webmail, as that would be more appropriate for webapps.stackexchange.com.
Provide basic guidance on when to use the tag. In other words, what kinds of questions should have this tag? Tags only exist as ways of organizing questions, so if we don’t provide proper guidance on which questions need this tag, they won’t get tagged at all, rendering the tag excerpt moot. Think of it as a sales pitch: in a room full of tags screaming “pick me!”, what would convince a question asker to select your tag?
Some tags are common knowledge. Most tags require a bit of explanation in the excerpt, even if it’s only 3 or 4 words. But if the tag is common knowledge — that is, if you walked up to any random person on the street and said the tag word to them, and they would know what you were talking about — then don’t bother explaining the tag at all. Stick to usage of the tag within your community in the excerpt."
See also: Good Tags now save a lot of work later!
