At the risk of suggesting more work for the stalwarts who already contribute most to this site (and of boring everyone to death as I revisit a topic I raise quite often):
Is there an approach we can adopt to systematically improve our tag wikis?
While many of them have 'excerpts' and some even have 'full wiki entries' we still have a number of problems:
- tags without any guidance at all
- tags with excerpts but not full entries
- tags with poor wiki content (including an inconsistent approach to providing the same level of guidance for similar tags).
- tags that don't have a clear purpose or overlap with other tags un-necessarily
We also have a number of exemplary tag wikis that could be used as a basis for improving others; and there have been a number of efforts to rationalise overlapping/similar tags.
Why should we improve matters?
- to make it easier for people to choose the right tags (which will reduce the effort in re-tagging)
- to steer those (few) people who will read the full tag wiki into asking better questions (by providing tag-specific guidance that we can't include in the main Help), which may reduce the workload of improving questions
- to give us tag-specific guidance to which to point posters who obviously need more guidance on constructing their question.
As a by-product of reviewing all the tags, I'd also hope to see:
- more tag rationalisation where appropriate
- potentially, generation of topics either for the regular chats or (even better) for canonical questions
- a framework for constructing new tag wikis more quickly and easily
I'm not suggesting we should put so much guidance in the tag wikis that we obviate the need for (even basic) questions -- but I am suggesting we pay attention to the advice here https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/03/24/redesigned-tags-page/ especially
[the] tags page is an essential map of what your community is, and is not, about.
To inform the discussion (and maybe prioritise activities), here is a snapshot analysis of our tag usage, based on a rough categorisation I've allocated to the tags... where the category is blank, I couldn't pigeon-hole the tag. And bear of mind, this is about numbers of tags (not questions, which have multiple tags).
tags page
that the Stack Overflow blog posting was referring to: genealogy.stackexchange.com/tags