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Was interested in learning more about a particular tag (in a single tag filter page) when I realized just how much tag wikis must be embarrassing to the folks who run this joint

sad learn more link imaeg

Look at that anemic "learn more...", hidden in a bunch of other links. If I were a new user, what would I think when I saw that? Perhaps it's just a link to a wikipedia page? I'd certainly think that there isn't anything interesting behind it. Certainly not like a lovingly maintained, well curated listing of resources and relevant questions created and continuously updated by my fellow users. No friggen way.

Now, you say, for users with less rep, the "learn more..." link is the first one at the bottom. Well I say yeah, but still! It's just a dinky link with no indication that important knowledge lies beyond. That should not be.

I think there should be some redesign here to bring tag wikis closer to the surface. Perhaps replace this with a "show more" button (when there is more to show), that expands the wiki inline? Perhaps make the default view the wiki, and have a separate tab for questions? OOH! No, add a marquee with "Check out our awesome wiki on this subject right now, noobs!" scrolling underneath the excerpt! Yeah, that's my choice, but you guys can figure out the details.

Can you add a story for me on this?

** After I drew the FHC I moused over to the save button on the image and clicked it. I'm not a very smart man.

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  • 6
    Tag wikis overall suffer from visibility issues. +1 just for the footnote.
    – user102937
    Commented May 19, 2016 at 17:13
  • 1
    ^ that, but my +1 is for the marquee
    – Mathieu Guindon
    Commented May 19, 2016 at 17:13
  • Might be obvious, but... where exactly you see this? (don't remember ever seeing such a "Save" button for tags?)
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented May 19, 2016 at 17:43
  • @ShadowWizard: New-nav single tag filter page?
    – Nathan Tuggy
    Commented May 19, 2016 at 17:48
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    @NathanTuggy thanks, used the new nav for a short time before getting myself out of it (I couldn't search due to series of bugs and bad design). Tagged properly now.
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented May 19, 2016 at 17:53
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    marquee sounds good, But <blink> is better!
    – Bhargav Rao
    Commented May 19, 2016 at 17:58
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    "I'd certainly think that there isn't anything interesting behind it." Frankly, most of the time there isn't anything interesting or useful there, because very few people bother spending any effort on improving tag wikis (or even looking at them to see if they need improvement), because people rarely read them anyway, because there's rarely anything useful there... It's a kind of a vicious circle. Improving the visibility of tag wikis might indeed help break it, but as an inevitable side effect, it would also expose years and years of accumulated crap. A clean start might almost be better.
    – Ilmari Karonen
    Commented May 20, 2016 at 20:57
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    @BhargavRao Maybe my <blink> logic can be re-used?
    – rene
    Commented May 21, 2016 at 11:48
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    Strongly related request to restyle the tag wikis: Improving the tag wiki user experience by standardizing the naming convention
    – Travis J
    Commented Sep 27, 2016 at 23:14
  • Related MSO question: Make tags that have associated Stack Exchange sites more obvious.
    – ahiijny
    Commented Apr 19, 2019 at 19:41

1 Answer 1

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I think in general that UI is a bit overcrowded, and while the features are helpful, they're probably not necessary all on the same bar like that.

For example, in the new UI, Votes is already available in the filter button, so we can remove that, Top users and Synonyms are already laid out in a much prettier format on the tag info page, so those can be removed too.

improve tag info

I don't think you're really gonna be interested in improving the tag info if you don't even know there's a problem and haven't clicked "learn more...", so we can remove that.

With the four of those removed, and some extra padding and love, we could have something like this:

In this version the focus is heavily on the "learn more" button.

On a side note, most tags don't teach you about the tag, so maybe "read more" is more accurate.

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