What should I do with suggested edits to the wiki of bad tags?

Question

An edit for the abandonware tag wiki came up in the review queue, and it's a fine edit, but the tag's existence is bad. It's clearly a meta tag (i.e. it does nothing to describe a question on its own; nobody can be an expert in abandonware).

It seems kind of pointless to edit the wikis of bad tags (especially ones used so infrequently - four questions!) and I wouldn't want to encourage such things, but I don't want to reject a well-meaning and otherwise good edit without knowing the policy on such things.

What should I do when reviewing edits to tags that should not exist?

Answer 1

Reject it with the reasoning that the tag doesn't even need to be here.

If it's not clear that the tag is a meta-tag then bring it up here on meta to gauge its worthiness and relevance. You can still reject the suggested filler with similar reasoning.

And then slowly start removing the tags from questions.

Answer 2

I have to disagree with the accepted answer.

Why reject a perfectly good edit? What if the user put a lot of effort into the edit - why penalize them and risk them not participating in something they were interested in?

If it's not plagiarism (or un-cited) and it's not bad information - just approve it - it's acceptable. If the tag shouldn't exist, then that's something else to address.

You could even ping the user and explain that it's a meta-tag and point them to a meta question about it; but you don't need to reject the edit and basically tell the user "you don't deserve two rep for the effort you made."

Even in the privilege of approving tag wikis, there are only two requirements mentioned -

• All the content is original or attributed properly
• Wiki excerpts are concise and contain an objective description of the tag

nothing about "check to make sure the tag is useful." That's the job of someone that has the privilege of creating new tags.

Answer 3

Hastur's comment on the question raises another point that's worthy of coverage in an answer. As long as a tag exists, it has the potential to be used. If it has no definition and is ambiguous, Murphy's law says it will not only be used, but misused, creating work later. Users don't always read the excerpts, but to the extent they do, it helps to have one, even if the tag is temporary.

Some of the manufacturer meta tags have been edited to state that the tag is deprecated and not to use it. At some point, the tag will be gone. In the meantime, the edit is useful. The manufacturer tags with no deprecation warning are continuing to pop up on new questions.

As both Hastur and Raystafarian described, removal of a tag should be a separate action.

Time Consideration: If a tag has any significant number of questions, the protocol for tag cleanup is for a public comment period of typically a week or more, so the tag will typically be around for awhile and subject to the consideration mentioned above.

The example here is sort of a special case. If a tag is blatantly bad (and there's disagreement over whether this one was), and has only a couple of questions, users with enough rep to edit can (and do) just delete the tags. In that case, the only justification for the edit is the one in Raystafarian's answer.

The empty tags are deleted by the system in 24 hours. If you have less than 20K rep, you can only vote to approve the tag edits, and the edits need to attract sufficient other voters who agree. So, it's a race to the finish line whether the editor will even get the rep unless you purposely delay deleting the tags.