3

A few days ago there was a question (How does Browscap work?) in which the user asked for a couple of tags to be created ( and ).

I created these tags and added an excerpt/wiki for each, but I noticed 3 out of 4 of those suggested edits were rejected. The text in the wikis was fine/representative of the tags so I guessed that a mod had declined these as he/she didn't think the tags should actually be created.

Now another user has asked the same thing in another question (Making comment field values accessible to Rules), and I'm not sure how to proceed.

Are there any official guidelines on this or is it just a judgement call?

1 Answer 1

1

The tag wiki suggestions were declined because the tag was used just from a question; in that case, the tag is automatically deleted after X days. In fact, when I used a custom declining reason, I wrote:

The tag is used by only a question; such tags are automatically removed. It's better to provide a tag description for tags that are going to be kept.

When a tag is removed, its tag wiki is not anymore accessible, if not to moderators, who see the list of orphaned wikis as in the following screenshot.

screenshot

As you see, it's not possible to understand to which tags those tags wiki are referring, and Stack Exchange is not able to re-associate a tag wiki with its tag, in the case there are questions re-using that tag.

Recently, I approved a tag wiki for a tag used from just a question, but the reason I approved it is that I misunderstood its purpose: While I thought it was related to a Drupal 8 concept, the tag is really about a third-party module. If I understood that, I would not have approved the tag wiki, simply because the tag is used from a single question.

About the requests to add new tags, those should be created if there is already the need of using them; they should not be created because a user wants to use it in a question.

The criterion I normally use to understand if the tag is necessary is: Is there an expert behind that tag? For example, to answer questions tagged , you need to know the Views module; to answer questions, you need to know the form API; there isn't an expert that answers to questions, which would be any question about code showing an error. In the latter case, the tag is too broad to be helpful.
Clearly, that is not the only criterion that could be applied, but it helps to trim out the possible candidates as tags because not every word that appears in a question needs to be a tag.

1
  • Good stuff. Thanks for the clear explanation as always
    – Clive Mod
    Commented Mar 14, 2012 at 20:14

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .