The tag wikis could use some love. What should a great Workplace tag wiki include?

Question

I've been looking through the tag wikis and many of them are one-line, blank, or conflate the excerpt with the rest of the wiki.

Compared to best-practice examples from other SE sites, our tag wikis could use some love. Better tag wikis can help users understand what is and is not relevant for the site, provide answers to frequently repeated questions, and catalog the best knowledge we've generated.

What should and should not be included in great tag wikis at The Workplace?

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The network has had conversations on tag wikis as well:

• Stack Exchange: What is a tag wiki...?, Examples of great tag wikis, Tag Wiki best practices
• Stack Overflow: Renovating the [regex] tag wiki, Accept or reject tag excerpt...?
• Super User: Can we please have better tag wiki excerpts?
• The blog: Redesigned Tags Page

And we've discussed it before: A note on tag wiki excerpts.

Answer 1

What should and should not be included in great tag wikis at The Workplace?

From https://workplace.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/trusted-user, we can see a description on what should one write on tag wikis (emphasis mine):

What should I write in the tag wiki?

See the guidelines in the blog post announcing tag wikis in their current form. To summarize:

• The excerpt is the elevator pitch for the tag.
• Avoid generically defining the concept behind a tag, unless it is highly specialized.
• Concentrate on what a tag means to your community.
• Provide basic guidance on when to use the tag.

I think that those guidelines are useful for when writing tag wikis and excerpts.

Answer 2

Here's a composite of what was posted here and discussions on other SE sites that I think offers some practical guidance. Of course, there aren't any hard and fast rules (that I've found) other than the standards that govern contributions across the site - this is a summary of the best guidance I could find across SE.

Excerpts

Tag wiki excerpts should explain when a tag should be used. For example:

For questions about advancing one's career as a whole rather than working in a specific job function or company. career-development

Tag wiki excerpts should not:

• Define the term
• Offer a self-referential explanation.

Wikis

Tag wikis should stand alone as a description of the tag and include all of the information needed to understand the excerpt in detail.

Wikis should do a number of things:

• Outline the issues related to a topic
• Describe issues or topics that are not related to the tag
• Identify related tags, to aid navigating and selecting tags
• Link to frequently asked questions with excellent answers
• Link to authoritative outside resources

Wikis should not:

• Provide answers, answers are for answers
• Replicate or remix content without attribution

Answer 3

Could are tag excerpts and wikis use some love? Yes. But the changes we make need to be helpful and accurate. Don't edit for the sake of editing. I just voted to reject six of the tag edits you suggested in review because I didn't find them helpful.

Most of the excerpts I rejected because of a cyclical definition:

Tag excerpts amounting to, "[tag] is for questions about [tag]" are pointless and usually rejected. Excerpts should describe why and when a tag would be used.

Simply saying the termination tag should be used for "Questions about terminating employment" is not at all helpful to someone who doesn't know what termination means. Instead, excerpts should be short one- or two-liners that help to define a tag and how to apply. For example this tag could be

For questions about involuntarily losing one's job, such as being fired or laid off. Questions about voluntarily leaving a job should use the resignation tag.

You also changed the termination definition from being only about involuntary termination (aka firing) to being about both voluntary and involuntary termination. I don't know which version is correct for how we use the tag here (we also have the resignation tag for questions about leaving a job voluntarily), but if you are going to change the meaning of a tag, you need to bring it up in Meta first so the community can agree on a definition.

Lastly, you edited the wikis for two country tags to also include a list of links to every other country tag we have. These tags are not at all relevant and only add clutter to the wiki. Some of the "best-practice" tags you link to include a list of relevant tags, but they should be tags that are often closely linked to one another. Someone who uses the mac tag may also want to use the tag macbook-pro. Someone who uses the tag united-kingdom is not likely interested in tagging egypt as well. Someone tagging california might be interested in the united-states tag though.

Wikis should provide more information defining the tag, and possibly include some helpful links, but they should be relevant. Generally useful links might be to canonical questions on Main or Meta that apply to a certain tag (e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4). For tags which are only relevant to a specific location (e.g. country tags, relieving-letter, gdpr), it would be useful to link to sites on relevant employment laws and government agencies for that location.