I've mentioned this in the chatroom before but I think it's worth making a real proposal now that tagging is somehow topical here at travel.SE.
If some concept is so important that it needs a new tag, surely it's also important enough to tell us why it's needed and how to apply it in its own tag wiki and tag wiki excerpt.
We're graduating soon and we still have quite a few tags with no wiki or with poor wikis that go against the Stack Exchange guidelines.
I feel that users who have been here a while and built up a fairly high rep should naturally have a bit more responsibility. If you have that rep you obviously made it by writing. By writing questions and answers. So we know you're capable of writing. The system has trusted you enough to allow you to create tags. We should entrust you to put some of your writing practice into describing your new tag when you create it by writing a wiki for it.
Anyway there's no way to enforce what I'm suggesting. I'm proposing it as a guideline that we should encourage people to try to adhere to. If you think your new tag improves the site, giving it a wiki definitely improves the site.
Yep I'm guilty of this too so no need to tell me! I've written lots of tag wikis, mainly excerpts but I've also created a good few that still lack wikis. (Usually ones that I expected would become synonyms of other existing tags I think.)
There was a Stack Exchange blog post by Jeff Atwood back in August 2011, "Improved Tagging" that everybody should read. It offers 5 key points to writing good tag wikis, that are all fleshed out more thoroughly in the blog post:
- The excerpt is the elevator pitch for the tag.
- Avoid generically defining the concept behind a tag, unless it is highly specialized.
- Concentrate on what a tag means to your community.
- Provide basic guidance on when to use the tag.
- Some tags are common knowledge.
