How should we phrase tag wiki excerpts and descriptions?

Question

hippietrail has already done a good job of adding descriptions and excerpts to tag wiki and there are many still in queue (which I regretfully can't approve because I have a daily approval limit :(). His edits are consistent and most tag wiki excerpts and descriptions begin with "Questions about X" where X is the description of whatever the tag refers to. It seems to me like a good enough scheme, but most edits by other people don't follow it, and I think it's better if we have a standard.

Looking briefly at other SE sites, it seems to me like the situation is different in each site. I think actually I prefer Stack Overflow's approach, which doesn't use introducing phrases like "Questions about..." or "This tag marks topics about..." for tags that simply refer to terms such as C++, Java, networking, etc. It's obvious that the users going to the tag wiki for these tags want to know what these things actually are, and they don't need the introducing phrase, since it's kinda obvious that the C++ tag refers to questions about whatever C++ is and the same things goes to the loanwords or verbs tags.

Now, I don't think adding these introductions would be so bad, but if we do, I think we should at least be consistent about it.

Answer 1

I would say leave the prefix out of the excerpt, but it can be in the full wiki description.

I know I originally started modelling my excerpts after some of the existing ones, but then I stopped doing so because it seemed redundant and just made the tag tooltip larger and more wordy. I think the excerpts work best as a lightweight quick summary of the topic, and the more unnecessary words there are, the harder it is to read. Especially on the more complicated tags that already are long because the topic is hard to describe.

Answer 2

Update: As observed by Amanda, the tags page sometimes removes the beginning of a tag wiki excerpt, and because of this trick, some excerpts are currently broken on the page. This is silly, but it might be better to always add “This tag is …” at the beginning of the excerpt (which will be removed on the tags page). Anyway I will wait before editing excerpts further. (Not that I have edited many so far.)

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Glancing at the tags page, the “tag wiki excerpts” of many tags start with one of:

• Applies to any question asking about …
• Questions about …
• A term which covers …
• Related to …
• Refers to …
• For …

and all of them look unnecessary. Because the tags page is already fairly crowded, I think that shorter tag wiki excerpts are better in general.

In tag wiki body, I agree that these phrases are unnecessary, but I doubt that we should care a lot about consistency. While consistency across different tags is definitely nice, we are not writing a book, and consistency is not mandatory. So it is good that you have brought this issue on meta, but we should not worry too much about it.