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I just edited some tag wikis to explain what the tag was for. I did it for tags like pcp and qma where it may not be clear what the acronyms stand for. So for example, for QMA, I explained what it stands for and linked to the Wikipedia page. (See the tag wiki for QMA.)

I think it would be nice if tag wikis contained enough information to decide what the tag is about. For some tags this is obvious, for other like qma and approximation-hardness, one could just explain that they stand for Quantum Merlin Arthur and Hardness of Approximation respectively, and link to their Wikipedia page, or their page on the complexity zoo, etc.

Is there anything else people feel that tag wikis should contain? For example, StackOverflow's tag wikis are huge. See the tag wiki for PHP for example. At this stage of the site it seems unnecessary to have such long tag wikis.

So this is my suggestion:

A tag wiki should explain what the tag is for (when the tag name doesn't explain it well enough) and perhaps contain a reference (to a website or book) to explain what the concept is. Usually Wikipedia links should suffice for this purpose.

Suggestions? Comments? Also, if your reputation is not high enough, you can request tag wiki edits in this thread, and someone who has enough rep can make the changes.

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  • $\begingroup$ If you want this to be a repository of requests, you should make it CW. $\endgroup$
    – Suresh Venkat
    Commented Sep 20, 2010 at 0:26
  • $\begingroup$ Right, done. Maybe a separate thread for requests might be appropriate too. Depends on how much discussion we want to have. $\endgroup$
    – Robin Kothari
    Commented Sep 20, 2010 at 1:48

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Sounds like an excellent idea. I'd also add some disambiguation text for tags that are easily confused - for example big-picture and soft-question

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    $\begingroup$ Yes, good idea. Confusing tags should be explained too. $\endgroup$
    – Robin Kothari
    Commented Sep 20, 2010 at 1:49
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    $\begingroup$ Perhaps for the complexity classes we should add a link to the complexity zoo. $\endgroup$
    – Joe Fitzsimons
    Commented Sep 20, 2010 at 16:55
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Also, if your reputation is not high enough, you can request tag wiki edits in this thread, and someone who has enough rep can make the changes.

It might be better to write something along the following to the [lg.learning] tag wiki:

The tag [lg.learning] refers to machine learning.

to clarify that it does not refer to learning (studying) in general. Although this should be immediate from the list of questions, I have seen at least one question which was originally tagged as [lg.learning] for no apparent reason and I suspect that the reason is that the asker was confused about what the tag means.

Of course, whether new users (especially those who do not check the list of questions) read the tag wiki or not is another matter, but writing one line will not hurt.

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  • $\begingroup$ it's been updated. $\endgroup$
    – Suresh Venkat
    Commented Sep 22, 2010 at 17:05
  • $\begingroup$ @Suresh: Thanks! $\endgroup$
    – Tsuyoshi Ito
    Commented Sep 22, 2010 at 18:01

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