Conventions for tag wiki excerpts, especially on jurisdiction tags

Question

Providing tag wiki excerpts is helpful to the community. As explained here:

The tag excerpt is the first, and sometimes only information about a tag that users see when tagging a question. If users can use them appropriately when they're composing their questions, then that saves time for everyone in the long run, as we won't need to edit those questions.

Also, later down the track, it'll save a lot of time as gold tag-badge holders can single-handedly close questions originally tagged with their gold tag badge. This doesn't work if people are using the wrong tags.

However we should try to maintain some consistency within our tag schema. This answer provides excellent guidance (as does the applicable help page):

1. A good tag excerpt is as short as possible.
2. Preferably don't prefix excerpts with variants of “For questions relating to ….” That's just noise.

I propose that we follow these standards. Clarifications and amendments (if any) should be posted as answers here.

Convention for Jurisdiction Tags

See new proposed convention below.

In general, jurisdiction tags do not need definitions. E.g., it's safe to assume that everyone knows that canada is a country. If you think it would be useful to put a bunch of legal and regulatory details in its wiki that's fine. At that point you have to put a 20-character excerpt in order to save the wiki content. However the excerpt should be trivial and minimal – "For questions specific to Canada" is adequate. Again, the goal is to minimize noise in the excerpt.

Examples of jurisdictions where an excerpt is needed and appropriate:

• georgia: The U.S. state of Georgia. For the country, use the georgia-country tag.
• new-york: The U.S. state. For questions pertaining only to the city use the new-york-city tag.

Answer 1

Jurisdiction tag excerpts should be treated just like any other tag excerpt: provide the information needed for someone to decide if it's the correct tag or not: what jurisdiction it covers, and which other jurisdictions they might be interested in. For example, a united-states excerpt:

United States federal jurisdiction. For state jurisdiction, use the appropriate state tag instead.

Answer 2

For the jurisdictional tags could we use excerpts like:

"State of California, United States Jurisdiction" for california

"City of New York, New York, United States Jurisdiction" for new-york-city

Doing so gives at a glance the purpose of the tag while avoiding the "For questions specific to..." language.

Answer 3

The guidelines in the /help centre are very web developer specific. It makes sense that "HTML" tag shouldn't say "Hyper-Text Markup Language", because it doesn't stand for anything else at SO, and if you don't know what "HTML" is as-is, then you're probably in the wrong place anyways. There, it does make sense to provide further instructions on using individual tags within html (yet, surprisingly, if you look at HTML Excerpt History over at SO, they don't appear to do that on StackOverflow, either!).

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Here at law, we have tags like "TAA" and "Canada".

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Why would anyone from outside of Texas know that "TAA" stands for "Texas Apartment Association"? (Why does it stand for Texas Apt. A.? Well, because questions with such meaning were the first ones to grab it, plus it goes in line with them being the owner of http://taa.org/, so, it is justified to have such a tag for such a rather prominent association in such a big state as Texas.)

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So, what about the "Canada" tag? Let's take a look at Canada tag excerpt revisions:

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Questions specific to Canada.

1. Duh. What else tags are for if not for "questions" that are "specific to" the tag?

2. What if I'm looking for answers? Is browsing this tag useless for me? No answers under such tag, just the unanswered questions?

3. So, if I live in Oklahoma, in Canadian County, or in Canada in Kansas or Kentucky, this tag is for me? Do we all share it?

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Canada is a country in North America, consisting of 10 provinces and 3 territories

I think this is the best excerpt of the 3, yet it's against the rules in /help, because it simply describes what it is. Yet it does provide further direction and hints that the provinces and territories likely have their own laws (and tags!). (Why not say it explicitly that provinces have their own laws? Well, let's be a little bit more civilised here, and not assume that everyone is a complete fool.)

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Jurisdiction of Canada

1. In Kansas? Kentucky? Oklahoma?

2. What else would "Canada" stand for on Law SE if not for a jurisdiction? (At least this tag doesn't try to exclude questions that have answers, too!)

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I think we should avoid having any sort of excerpts like "Jurisdiction of [tag]", "Questions specific to [tag]", "For questions related to the [tag-unabbreviated]". It makes little sense to point out obvious facts — that tags like "Canada" are the jurisdictional ones. What else would they be if not jurisdictions? Likewise for mentioning the fact that a tag is for "questions" that are "specific to".

I think it makes much more sense to actually describe the jurisdiction, what it consists of, and what are the major city / capital etc.

Answer 4

Here's a standard for jurisdiction tag excerpts based on the only practical consideration that I can see mattering:

The wiki excerpt is used in three places:

1. On tag mouse-over
2. On the Tags page
3. During auto-complete of tag entry

Here is an example of the third place, which is arguably the most important place for the tag wiki to do its job:

Whether on the Tags page or during tag entry, users are either looking for a jurisdiction tag, or looking for non-jurisdiction tags. We should make it as easy as possible to find or ignore that tag class. Therefore:

The proposed standard is:

1. Start all jurisdiction excerpts with "Jurisdiction of "
2. Repeat the jurisdiction name
3. Provide minimal details necessary for disambiguation, so as to maximize the visual coherence of the jurisdiction tags

Examples:

• Jurisdiction of California (U.S. state)
• Jurisdiction of New York (U.S. state; use new-york-city instead for the city)
• Jurisdiction of Georgia (U.S. state; use georgia-country for the Caucasian country)
• Jurisdiction of Canada (country)