47
NO.
I routinely reject tag wikis that are copy-pasted from Wikipedia, because they are almost never appropriate. Consider a recent suggested excerpt from my review history on Science Fiction & Fantasy:
Brandon Sanderson (born December 19, 1975) is an American fantasy author. A Nebraska native, he currently resides in American Fork, Utah. He earned ...
38
By Popular Demand...'s suggestion Research Assistant is now deployed ...
But wait, there is more... you also get badge progress...
(To see the badge progress, go to any tag wiki and look in the right-hand column, about halfway down.)
Looking through the data, it seemed to me that excerpts are handled fairly well by the community. I wanted to add a push ...
32
I've suggested this elsewhere, probably in the comments, but it applies well here:
Whenever a user rejects an edit as either plagiarism or vandalism, the suggested edit should display a large notice indicating that. Plagiarism and vandalism can sometimes be hard to spot for those who don't take as much time to thoroughly investigate every aspect of an edit, ...
32
What is a tag wiki?
Each tag on Stack Exchange has two pieces of user-editable content associated with it:
a short tag wiki excerpt of up to about 500 characters of plain text, and
a full tag wiki page describing the tag in more detail.
The excerpt is the "elevator pitch" for the tag, and is shown in many places where the tag is used. However, its length ...
30
All content on the Stack Exchange is licensed under the CC Wiki license. By copying the Linux man pages verbatim you are in effect trying to re-license that content, without stating any proof that you have the right to do so. Note that the rejection reason states:
This edit plagiarizes content from an external source without proper attribution.
Emphasis ...
28
There's no UI for this, but the functionality exists. Drop this into your console, fill in the userID, optionally adjust the days to be banned, and it's done.
$.post("/admin/ban-suggested-edits", {userId:whateverUserId, days:4, fkey: StackExchange.options.user.fkey})
If this is commonly-needed, we could probably enable it in the normal UI; we omitted it ...
26
I think a better solution would be to lock the tag wiki for untagged to something that explains what it is and what users should do when they see it (I have no idea how this will be implemented on the backend, but this is obviously the best solution to the problem). Something along the lines of:
Excerpt
These poor questions have lost all of their tags. ...
26
Usually, when I want to find something on SO, I use [search ] textbox at top-right corner of browser. It's intuitive action. But it seems that SO search looks only in questions, not in tag wikis.
I'm not sure if SO search engine can be easily modified to support tag wiki.
So, for now, keeping or moving information in/to tag wikis will just hide it from ...
25
This is a bug.
As ire_and_curses suggests, repetitious tag wiki excerpts should be edited.
Often people try to convey useful information before the word "is", for example here. Mangling them automatically will silently mess this up, displaying a tag summary that may make no sense. It forces you to rephrase to circumvent the mangling.
23
Here's a suggestion...
When you search for something, and the search sees you have included one or more tags in your search terms, then the search results can include the tag excerpt at the top along with some helpful links for the searcher:
I guess you'd want to show the most popular tag's excerpt, and maybe include an expando link such as, "Other tags ...
22
Separating tag wiki edits into a separate review queue will also allow us to enforce the different level of scrutiny required when reviewing these edits.
Tag wikis are especially prone to plagiarism, and hence reviewers should search Google for exerpts from the edit to check that it is not plagiarised. In some cases, bans apply for approving blatant ...
19
Yes, I think a badge for editing many tag wikis would motivate some editors. The caveat is that many people write substandard tag wikis (folks, don't copy-paste Wikipedia, it's not the right information in 99.99% of the cases); but the badge would encourage more people to eyeball tag wikis with a view of improving them, which should compensate.
Given the ...
19
Even though I love pictures, this seems sorta pointless. Since it doesn't appear on the tag page (unlike the for-pay sponsored tags), it doesn't do much for advertising, and they take the place of actual content.
I guess I could sorta see iPad / iPhone since those are actual devices and... Maybe someone doesn't know what they look like? Meh.
I recommend ...
19
Here's what I'm thinking:
When I go to reject an edit, add a text field to the copied content reason, a place to indicate where the content was copied from:
Since we now have this information, we can show it to subsequent reviewers - along with a big red alert bubble:
The link would be clickable, opening a new tab with the allegedly-copied-from ...
18
Works now, you can edit any wikis on per-site metas, including the ones sourced from this meta.
The thing is, our little meta here is a funny place, sometimes the tag wikis we float to the child metas do not properly fit the community.
The community now have full control around evolving tag wikis on site metas.
18
Wow, I really don't like this.
You lose control over what gets displayed in the question list blurb. It would have been better if, for example, the XML blurb had simply stopped at the paragraph break, or a separate space had been provided for the blurb text. As it is, the text is going to get cut off in all sorts of awkward ways.
I think I know why this ...
18
It is copied from the same tag on Meta SO.
According to an online dictionary the meaning of periodically can be too:
from time to time, frequently
And that is the meaning of the word used here.
17
This is a pertinent issue, since one expects some kind of standard to be applied when it comes to the way that information gets presented across the different areas of each SE site.
Looking at the "activity" tab, under "suggestions" we get the information presented as follows:
This information is expected to be equally presented to the user on other areas ...
17
What are some examples of really well done tag Wikis?
The Scala one. My goodness. If every wiki looked like that....
17
Yeah, yeah, technically the rejection notice states “this edit plagiarizes content from an external source without proper attribution”, whereas your edits did provide attribution. However, your edits were not appropriate because they did not respect the license of the content you copied, hence the heading “copied content” did apply. All content on Stack ...
17
Our tag wikis are for frequently asked questions, book lists, and a bit of general knowledge. Wikipedia doesn't do that.
Check out the PHP tag wiki. Will any Wikipedia page do that? No. They may have a list of resources, but they won't have a FAQ section.
I don't see much of a benefit here, we're just making it worse if we add that.
16
Some sites have organized themselves around a primary tag categorization system. For a subject with a single, logical way to divide most questions, there will inevitably be hapax legomena. In fact, they will likely follow a Zipfian distribution unless the tag set is naturally finite and the question set is allowed to grow without limit.1 Unless your ...
16
I don't agree with the "it's better than nothing" statement. We already tell people to "go read the tag wiki." So now they go read the tag wiki and it's only a link. Basically saying "ok, now go read this website."
A link-only tag wiki is just as bad as a link-only answer. It's not useful. We want the information here. I'd have no problem with adding a link ...
15
IMHO, tag wikis aren't particularly useful for the vast majority of tags. When a tag grows large enough to have its own sub-community on the site, and they take the time to put together a comprehensive directory of information on the subject, it can become something of value - but all too often, wikis collect fairly useless Wikipedia excerpts and nothing ...
15
I would propose that the existing tag wiki be broadened to discuss the use of this keyword in the several languages in which it appears. Tags like final-java are quite ugly in my opinion.
15
Assuming you own the text (i.e. you wrote it, and didn't assign the copyright to a company you don't control), it is of course fine to submit it as a tag wiki here.
However, reviewers don't know that. You should write in the edit summary what is going on, so that reviewers know it's legit. If necessary, also put a link to your Stack Overflow user page from ...
15
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.
...
14
The current state of this situation is ... unsatisfying.
Here is a screenshot from Cryptography Stack Exchange's meta:
We got a lot of tags auto-created when the site started, but most of them have no tag wikis (= guidance for users on how to use them). The tag wiki excerpts for the mandatory and some moderator-only tags are there, but no other one.
I can ...
14
Here's what I do:
It serves as both an immediate deterrent (the tag wiki is not used), and a long-term deterrent (if someone has too many of their suggested edits rejected, they are automatically barred from suggesting any more for a certain period of time).
I realize that this doesn't solve the problem long-term, but these are the ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
