Cleanup, Cleanup, Everybody, Everywhere

Question

We've got a lot of cleanup to do in question's tags and older questions that fell of the radar for grammar/spelling/clarity changes. My biggest fear is that all these old questions will start to overlap the new, incoming questions. Suggestions? How do other sites take care of this?

As for examples of questions that need to be edited, if I find them I usually take care of them on the spot. My biggest concern is tags.

You've already seen my question about the baby tag. There are other tags that I question the purpose of. Some examples are the motivation tag, extended-family tag, or the outdoor tag. These three have few questions assigned to them and they have little to no bearing on the concepts of parenting. Outdoor could easily be play, extended-family could go into family and then we have tags for grandparents, and I don't see the purpose of motivation (perhaps I'm wrong on this one, let me know).

And although tag wikis won't affect the queue, I think it's a good idea we start building them up if we want to attract more people. Tags without excerpts are the most common to be misused. We should come together to try and hash out how those top two pages of tags are relevant to the site. There are some that I am clueless about since I'm only chugging along with two kids under the age of three.

Answer 1

The approach I've seen on other sites (primarily scifi.se) varies a bit depending on the context.

If there's a small number of unrelated tags, or a large number of related tags (I'm having trouble thinking of a large number of related tags that would apply here; but an example that springs to mind on scifi is a recent Harry Potter tag cleanup discussion), then post a single meta question indicating why you believe the tags may be a problem.

Some common signs that tags need some form of discussion and cleanup:

• tags that apply to a lot of questions, but are only used on a handful of them
• pairs of tags that seem to be used inconsistently and interchangeably
• tags where you just plain don't understand what it means or what it is supposed to accomplish

Any of those are worthy of a meta discussion.

For tag wiki updates, honestly, I believe the best approach is to just start making suggestions. Even if your suggestions aren't very good, the review process will trigger other people to look at them, and hopefully further improve them.

If there are tags where you'd like to see a wiki, but honestly don't know where to start, that's another good reason to start a meta discussion.

In all honesty, the more stuff we can bring to meta, the better. Meta participation is one area we've been consistently lacking, and I suspect it is almost as much of a barrier to our graduation as our insufficient pool of high reputation users.

The recent meta activity has been gratifying; let's try to keep that ball rolling!