Why was the "Drupal-Concepts" Tag and Wiki I created deleted, without notification or discussion?

Question

I have found a number of questions that could easily be categorized as "What is Drupal all about?" These are questions where mostly new users of Drupal are trying to understand its paradigm. As part of my interest in developing the tag wikis to cover basic information for various modules and Drupal, I created the tag and spent a couple hours developing information to place in it. When I return today to work on it, I find the tag has been deleted, without notification or explanation.

I presume that it takes moderator privileges to delete a Wiki and I would appreciate an explanation. Anticipating that the tag is considered too generic, I would ask how to help new users understand overall concepts without having to search through dozens of questions that touch on small parts of how Drupal works and do not interrelate each content piece. I would argue that there are enough questions from new site users that fall into this category that some sort of Getting Started Tag is desirable.

I believe in returning to the community for the help I have received as I learn more and have found work on the Wikis as a means to do so that, I believe, is especially helpful to new users. The Wiki content I had posted was an answer I had prepared for one of those broad how do I get started questions that was closed while I was writing an answer. I agree with the explanation to the questioner from the moderator, but I still thought there should be a place to provide information to such questions. Tag Wikis seems to be the only alternative place to help steer someone in the right direction. It does not seem right to tell someone who is struggling to 'get it', "don't ask us a broad question" and not offer them some direction.

Unfortunately, the work in progress I had posted in the Wiki was the only copy of that portion of the wiki content I have been working on. When a question is closed, the author can still see it. When this wiki was closed my work was simply deleted without warning. Very discouraging!

---

When I first began working with Drupal, I was very confused by how it works. I thought an active site like this one was very valuable for learning more (and it certainly has been). Some of my early questions sounded similar to the one that led me to explore this idea to help someone who is just getting started. My earliest questions were overly broad and confused, and more than once I was told so in comments. The comments were true, but not very helpful to me. The person with the closed question last week that got me started on this has a high reputation on stackexchange, but freely admitted he was a bit lost getting started. Our community response was to close his question. That is certainly not very helpful or hospitable.

I have been assuming and placing questions for discussion on meta relating to how best to help them get into the swing of things. Nobody can spend the time to answer a question such as "How does Drupal work?". But even though it is too broad, we should be able to provide some guidance on where to look for the answer. I believe it is OK to close the question, but we don't need to appear rude. Right now we are saying "Come back when your not so dumb!". Certainly there must be some way that we can help them get started? A generic get started tag might be just the thing. Could we include a "Drupal Basics" tag with a description that says it is a resource and not for use on questions.

Answer 1

I didn't delete the tag, but I strongly considered it. I was going to come back over the weekend and comment on it explaining why I didn't think it was a good fit for the site.

I'm sorry that it was deleted without any discussion or notification.

Answer 2

Anticipating that the tag is considered too generic, I would ask how to help new users understand overall concepts without having to search through dozens of questions that touch on small parts of how Drupal works and do not interrelate each content piece. I would argue that there are enough questions from new site users that fall into this category that some sort of Getting Started Tag is desirable.

There must be a misunderstanding about the purpose of tags, and the main purpose of a tag wiki.

A tag is not used for "help[ing] new users understand overall concepts without having to search through dozens of questions." It is used to categorize the questions; a question about the Views module is tagged views, while a question about CCK is tagged cck. If the purpose of tags were helping new users in understanding overall concepts, then views would be added to a question because one of the answers suggests using the Views module; in that way, the new users interested in the Views module would find also that question, and learn a case use for that module.
Not all the words are useful as tag; there are tags that are not helpful, such as beginner, error, subjective, getting-started, best-practices; some of them are considered meta tags.
A tag that is used in most of the questions is not helpful because it stops to categorize. To make an example, it is like when you attach labels to objects you see in a room; if 90 objects over 100 are labelled tools, tools is not helpful for classifying.
The point most important is that you don't create a tag so that you are then able to create a tag wiki. It's backward: You create a tag wiki for an already used tag, which needs a guideline about when to use it.

The purpose of the tag wiki is mainly to guide the users through the appropriate tags to use with their questions. The excerpt contains a short description of tag, or the topic associated to the tag; the tag wiki contains more information, such as a list of related tags, for which is described when to use one, and not the other tag. While the tag wiki can contains more information about the topic associated with the tag, its main purpose is not guiding new users to the available resources.
Tag wikis are not used as reference to the users asking questions, if not in the case you are saying to a user that he is inappropriately using a tag; they are not the equivalent of book pages you find on Drupal.org, nor are they equivalent of pages found on the Wikipedia.

About drupal-concepts, the tag is quite too broad; almost everything in Drupal is a Drupal concept: hooks, nodes, taxonomy terms, form API, field API, code registry. Other CMS's can have an equivalent concept, but the meaning Drupal gives to nodes is pretty specific to Drupal.

I have deleted the tag wiki, but because I was trying to see what the difference is between that, and rejecting a suggested edit. Even if I used the "Reject" button, all you would have seen is that I declined the edit because it was an invalid edit.
Even on Stack Overflow a suggested edit for a tag wiki is approved or rejected; in the case the proposed edit is going to be rejected, there isn't a preliminary question opened on Meta Stack Overflow to explain the reason of the rejection. There is eventually a question opened from who proposed the edit, or there is a question on the meta site to coordinate a task between different users.