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I've been editing tag wikis for a while, and I always write tag wikis with this formatting:

Excerpt: Questions about using/installing (tag) on Ubuntu

Wiki: (tag) is a (blah blah blah). (extra info) then (external resources or official website)

For weeks and I never thought to change anything.

One day I went to the "Name" section of the tags page, which I never went there until now. There were tags wikis that were very different from other tag wikis, some long, some short, some irrelevant, some useful, some... well, you get the point. And some plagiarized.

Some tag wikis are really great that I want to ditch my own formatting.

After I read a bunch of different tag wikis, I thought maybe I should not use my usual formatting and use something else (better or not, just something else).

But before editing more tags (or creating new ones) I thought it would be right to ask here first:

What kind of tag wikis are considered as "good"?

1 Answer 1

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Thanks for taking the time to ask this question. I always intended to write this meta post on how we can improve our tag wikis and I'll use this opportunity to do exactly that.

In my opinion, a tag wiki should have

  • a brief introduction about what the tag is about, unless it is too commonsensical. For example, you would want to explain what a is, but not what a is.
  • what type of questions are welcome in the site with reference to the topic and what aren't.
  • some of the common FAQ in each of the tags. You would want to list how to configure different parts of Unity in Unity tag wiki, etc.
  • a tag wiki excerpt that summarily gives an overview of the topic / tag to people who are pretty short of time.
  • relevant links to official documentation when and where necessary for further research. If there is a more appropriate Stack Exchange site on the topic, feel free to mention it in the tag wiki as well as the tag wiki excerpt.

As well, a tag wiki should not

  • be merely a link to the official project page or the Wikipedia article.
  • be a copy+paste from other sources, whether or not you have properly cited. More often than not, such content are not appropriate for the site and I would like it if you don't do it that way.

Jeff Atwood has some really excellent guidance on how to write a great tag wiki. You can check this blog post:

You can also take a look at some of the splendid tag wikis in Stack Overflow like the java tag and the PHP tag. They should give you a very good idea on how great a tag wiki should be and can be.

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