Over in Music Fans (Beta) we're getting a lot of tag descriptions submitted that are, more or less, links to band's pages or links to Wiki pages about the band.
I've seen the link-only answer horse getting beaten to death, but I can't find any discussion on link-only tags. Should we let this fly, or should we ask our editors to summarize a little (in their own words)?
Tag wikis were added to create a editable, user-contributed resource for that site. If the wiki is simply sending users elsewhere to find that information, it should be rejected.
Tag wikis are there to help introduce newcomers to the tag. They may also contain guidelines on its usage and often contains frequently asked questions about the subject itself.
Sometimes a wiki might *include* a list of links to valuable resources of interest to that topic — that is acceptable — but if the wiki contain little more than something copied from Wikipedia or a link sending users elsewhere to get that information, it should be removed.
Review | Suggested Edits
Tag Wiki: Reject
This edit copies a significant amount of content from an external source. Generic descriptions such as encyclopedia articles and ad copy do not provide useful guidance; try creating something useful to this community specifically, and be sure to attribute the original author.
We had the same discussion on GIS SE Meta about 18 months ago as Are tag wikis with just an URL ok?
My answer there, which was the most upvoted and accepted, was:
I think a tag wiki with just a bare URL should be rejected so you have my full support on the policy outlined in your Question.
This may sometimes be coming about because new tag wiki writers are trying to write the tag wiki itself where the tag excerpt should go, because it is presented first. Having thus written the Tag Wiki in the excerpt box, all they may have left to write is a URL as reference.
Perhaps we need to try and do more education about the tag wiki excerpt being just the elevator pitch to the tag wiki. Next time I reject a "URL only" tag wiki suggestion, I will try to expand my feedback to its suggestor.
I think link-only tag wikis are bad for exactly the same reasons as link-only answers (and questions) i.e. they contribute no new content to the internet via the Stack Exchange network.
On the other hand, links within tag wikis, answers and questions that also have suitable context can be very useful as a way to lead to further reading on a topic.
I use the same "rule of thumb" for tag wikis, answers and question in that their minimum length should be "about a paragraph". I do not recall ever having reviewed a tag wiki edit that consisted of only "a list of 5 hyperlinks and corresponding labels" but I would view this as being "about four words of content" (the labels) i.e. less than a paragraph.
(Copying my answer to the discussion on Music Fans Meta, which was started not as discussion about tag wikis that only contain external links, but about if we want to have external links in tag wikis at all. It just happened to be the case that some of the edits in question added only external links.)
I think external links in tag wikis are useful. We are part of the Web, and hyperlinks are its building block. For example, having a tag wiki about a musician and not linking to the musician’s official site is kind of ungracious. You come to a tag wiki to learn more about the topic, and having a curated list of relevant external links is a big and important part of this.
This does not mean that our tag wikis should only consist of external links.
But the tag wikis don’t have to be extensive from the get-go. We should welcome any useful contribution. Tag wikis (should) grow over time.
It’s not just that we are more likely to achieve more if everyone does a little bit (instead of waiting for someone who does everything in one step), multiple (even if small) edits over time also lead to more eyes checking and reviewing the tag wikis, which will lead to better content.
Think of this:
Alice reads a question, gets interested, and clicks on one of the tags she doesn’t know a thing about. What is more useful? An empty tag wiki (→ Alice is disappointed and hits the back button), or a (far from complete) tag wiki that only contains a link to a source where she can read the topic’s definition?
There is the band named Death and there is the band named Death. There is nothing more powerful to identify a topic than by pointing to a URL.
Even if we’d love to, we will never be able to get complete and up-to-date tag wikis for every tag we have. Think of all the musicians that might only be known to a very small circle, or maybe only in their home city etc. And then think of discographies, tour dates, biographies. We won’t be able to cover everything. But other places might. Let’s link to them.
While links are ok to put in a tag wiki epically when it comes to citing sources, it's kind of silly to have wikis just be links to other sites epically when they are the first few search results in Google.
Our tag wiki should for the most part be self contained. Someone shouldn't have to go somewhere else to get basic information about a topic.
Let's just I didn't know anything about the band Guns N' Roses and I was curious about the band and clicked on the tag guns-n-roses and the learn more section, the only information I would get is this:
They aren't necessarily bad sources, but from our wiki alone I don't know more about the band without going somewhere else which kind of defeats the purpose of those wikis and isn't much better than leaving it blank. For bands and artist, we should strive to include basic information about them including:
None of that information is seen directly in the tag wiki and someone will need to go somewhere else for the information. We can and should add much, much more to these tag wikis over time and we should be able to maintain all of our tags without just relying on outsides sources or just pointing to them.
If you want to see an example of an over the top tag wiki that has all the information you would ever want about C#, check its wiki. There are plenty of useful links in the wiki, but the wiki itself is not just those links and inform the users a lot about the topic.
