It is probably not controversial to say that if you're creating a tag, you should add a description for it. Otherwise, how will anyone else know what you intended the tag to be used for?

Unfortunately, this is a challenge right now on Codidact.

Creating tags is a very easy ability. I'm not sure if I did anything at all to gain it, it was available the first time I tried after making a handful of posts.

However, I cannot edit the description of the tags I create. Of course, I try to make the tag name be obvious and self-explanatory, but sometimes this is not possible.

https://meta.codidact.com/abilities/edit_tags says that:

To earn this ability, you need to have roughly a 97.5% approval rate for suggested edits to either the detailed tag wiki or the usage guidance for tags, with a hard minimum of 76 approved suggested edits (these numbers may vary from site to site).

So I must edit existing tag wikis at least 76 times (more if some edits are rejected)! Well, that's going to be a while, because most existing tag descriptions are already not bad and there's not much to edit. Ironically, there are fewer tags with descriptions because of this requirement. I also don't want to engage in mod-grinding by making lots of trivial, contrived edits just to gain the privilege.

1. There should not be such a big difference between creating tags and editing their description. If you trust a user with one it doesn't make sense to not trust them with the other. Either both abilities must be hard to gain, or easy.
2. Adding a description to a tag you created is a good practice, new users should not be discouraged from it. We don't want more tags without a description! We want fewer. An exception should be made and the creator of a tag should always be able to edit it.

posted over 1 year ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

1y ago

matthewsnyder‭

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