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Just been going through fixing a lot of the tags ('Germany - questions about Germany' is NOT a descriptive tag!), and adding to some of the popular ones. Also fixed a lot of the singular tags, which have now been nicely converted to plurals. I think the first three pages of popular tags now have descriptions at least.

@Roflcopter, perhaps your program could be used to paste in the remaining ones for people to tackle?

To ANYONE - you're welcome - encouraged even, to add descriptions to tags, or fix them where you see fit. All get checked and approved by the moderators, so you're unlikely to wreck anything or make embarrassing mistakes, and all help is appreciated.

2 Answers 2

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Just a note that I can't repeat enough to relate some issues we went through on another of my SE sites. (I haven't checked anyone's new tag wikis so I'm not picking on anybody.)

All this advice is specifically about Usage guides (tag wiki "excerpts"). For the full tag wiki texts there are no severe space limitations (30,000+ characters are allowed) and no truncation issues so you can go wild with those. But it's still a good idea to be consistent.

When editing Usage guides, check the Tags page regularly. You will see that quite a few tags have their ends cut off and a few have the beginning cut off. Ideally we want to avoid this as much as possible. Two things are happening:

1. There is a length limit of ~500 characters. There's no place that tells us the exact limit so we have to keep checking to see that we don't go over it. (How many remain available does show.)

2. There is an algorithm that cuts out what it sees as unnecessary. This is often the part up to and including "is" or "are" and "This tag" when at the start.

So try to avoid tag excerpt text like Amarillo is a city in Texas. Instead just go for A city in Texas. - because the software will do it anyway and the result isn't always what you expect. For instance the initial capital letter will be lost.

Consistency

Try to make the tags as much in the same style as possible. This makes our site look professional and slick. If unsure just look at a sample of other tags. If there are tags similar to yours (other cities, other airport codes) then look at those. If there is a pattern, use it.

  • Start all excerpts with a capital letter and finish with a full stop.

The reason there are a bunch of tags like "Travel related to Germany." is for several reasons.

Stack Exchange has some tag wiki guidelines somewhere and they say to avoid definitions in tags.

I think Dori (SE staff) made some of these tags so they wouldn't be blank and wouldn't be definitions.

But I think for our particular SE site it doesn't make sense to stick too firmly to this rule as it results in redundant tags, which don't look professional at all.

After trying a few things for countries and some of them turning out pretty bad I suggest this:

  • For places you feel many people would not have heard of, a bit of definition is a good thing. Not everybody knows where the Pamir Highway is.

  • For places everybody does know try to list the one or two things that attract tourists. This can be tricky! Think of it as a writer's challenge - like writing a prose haiku!

  • For cities, I think at least including whether it is the capital, the biggest city, or both. Plenty of people don't realise LA is not the capital of California and Sydney is not the capital of Australia.

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  • I think we should differentiate between tag excerpts and tag descriptions. In the former, the text should be concise and informative, while in the latter, you can go crazy with additional information.
    – mindcorrosive
    Nov 9, 2011 at 7:57
  • Yes I meant to include this and specifically the suggestion to "go crazy" with the full wikis (-:
    – hippietrail
    Nov 9, 2011 at 8:04
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I can provide a list of these tags that have no wiki excerpt. This can be a hint which tags we want to tackle first. In the parentheses you can see the number of questions for this tag. I've sorted them by this number.

(11) (10) (6) (5) (5) (5) (5) (5) (4) (4) (4) (4) (4) (4) (4) (4) (4) (4) (4) (4) (4) (4) (4) (3) (3) (3) (3) (3) (3) (3) (3) (3) (3) (3) (3) (3) (3) (3) (3) (3) (3) (2) (2) (2) (2) (2) (2) (2) (2) (2) (2) (2) (2) (2) (2) (2) (2) (2) (2) (2) (2) (2) (2) (2) (2) (2) (2) (2) (2) (2) (2) (2) (2) (2) (2) (2) (2) (2) (2) (2) (2) (2) (2) (2) (2) (2) (2) (2) (2) (2) (2) (2) (2) (2) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1)

In total we have 611 tags of which 308 have no wiki excerpt.

Does anybody know how I can directly link this tags if possible?

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  • Annoyingly they seem to have numbers (travel.stackexchange.com/edit-tag-wiki/46 is air travel). However, can you get those numbers out of the API with your app? If so, you'll need to format it in the box above with square brackets around the name, and then a [1]after for each, with a reference list with links at the bottom. If that made no sense, try changing one of them to a link manually in the box, and see what SE does to it, and you'll get the idea. But seriously, if it's too much effort don't worry ;)
    – Mark Mayo
    Nov 9, 2011 at 7:55
  • File a bug report / feature request! They tag APIs seem not to mention this number. As a workaround you could periodically scan all possible tag numbers until you get an error.
    – hippietrail
    Nov 9, 2011 at 8:00
  • I'm a fellow hacker in the chat room so drop in and we'll figure it out.
    – hippietrail
    Nov 9, 2011 at 8:06
  • It's the edit pages that have the numbers. Link to the info pages. They don't have the numbers: http://travel.stackexchange.com/tags/france/info
    – hippietrail
    Nov 9, 2011 at 8:08
  • Ok so I can just generate a link quite easy. I'll try it later
    – RoflcoptrException
    Nov 9, 2011 at 8:27
  • 1
    I think you can leave out anything used just once from this section. Possibly also anything used just twice.
    – hippietrail
    Nov 9, 2011 at 9:35

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