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Creating tags is much easier than adding description
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.
- 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.
- 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.
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Although I have just created my first new tag as a fairly new user and thus profited from the current liberal approach, I would propose to raise the bar for creating a tag to the same threshold as for editing tag metadata (which might be somewhat lowered in return, but that is a different discussion). I agree with the argument by @matthewsnyder on why the gap is not helpful.
The rationale for raising the bar for creation is that new contributors should, in my opinion, have some time (and I acknowledge that it would be "enforced" on them) to get used to the categorization scheme on a site before changing it, in order to prevent tag proliferation which on Similarly Engineered sites can lead to orphaned tags or synonymous tags (sometimes so close in their names that someone should have noticed much earlier).
If they feel a tag is missing, they can still ask on the corresponding Meta site for a community consensus about the need for a new tag, which can then be implemented by an established user who has gained that ability.
2 comment threads
We currently have no way to suggest an edit for tag descriptions. This is a known gap and it's blocking the natural awarding of the Edit Tags ability. I think it probably also blocks doing something reasonable with creation, and I've just edited the GitHub issue to track this post.
In broad strokes: we need a way for people to suggest tag edits, which means we need a way to make the existence of those suggestions visible so they can be reviewed.
If we had that, then you could propose a tag description right after creating the tag. An even better way to do it, I think, would be to also detect the new tag and prompt you to suggest a description -- which you could skip past if you don't want to do it now, but that way it would be a little more discoverable.
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