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I was thinking that there may be some important tags that are missing in Law meta and I wonder how/if I can help rectify that to some extent.

Specifically, I'm wondering if there is a set process to go about proposing tags (and if so, what it is) or do I just add them when someone has a question and its missing the appropriate tags (likely because they couldn't add it because it didn't exist). For example, I just added one for regulations, and proposed an excerpt for that specific term. Under this tag, in the U.S., the CFR is the database (or series of volumes in book form) that holds all federal regs. There are similar codifications or regulatory schemes in other countries that are compiled. This could all be under the tag regulatory and then the county (jurisdictional) tag should be put in.

Also, I'm new to these type of sites that are community edited (I had no idea what a tag wiki even was until about 10 minutes ago), so I cannot help but wonder if the tags are what leads to search-ability or if the words within the text of the questions/answers trigger results.

I apologize if this is already on here or should be obvious. I looked (albeit briefly) and didn't find anything specifically (although I did see inquiry and discussion about usefulness, synonyms, organization, editing and excerpting of tags, but not actually adding or proposing new ones in some systemic way.

Ideally, each area of law would have a tag as civil litigation (or civil law or civil suit - all encompass many various distinct areas of law like contracts, land transactions, torts, and variety of other things that may be important terms and concepts to have in order to grow this topic area. I'd be happy to suggest some if it is as easy as that.

Thanks for all of your anticipated patience and input.

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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Adding new tags

As per How can we get rid of misspelled and unused (or “zombie”) tags?, tags without any questions assigned are destroyed daily, and their tag wikis orphaned - this means we can get the text, but it's no longer associated with the tag, so even if it's recreated later, the wiki still needs to be rewritten.

Also:

  1. Tags are created by adding them to questions1; and
  2. Tags that are used only once will be removed after six months2

On the purpose of tags

There's some information in the help center on tag wiki excerpts, which are the primary way we organise questions - excerpts should help new users tag their questions correctly.

While Google will index everything, the built-in search function indexes by question and answer body text (excluding comments). It also allows filtering by tags, so for instance, if you are interested primarily in , you can mark that as a favourite, and it will be highlighted in the active questions feed. Similarly, you can ignore a tag, and it'll be greyed-out.

Most of the rest of my answer would come from Why do we tag questions?, so I'll just link to it here.

One other thing of note, though: tags do have some moderation purpose - gold tag badge holders (1000 score in 200 non-wiki answers) can single-handedly mark duplicate questions.

1. See Can we please have the [foo] tag on our site?
2. See Should We Zap The Low-Occurrence Tags?

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  • Ok helpful! So, what is a "non-wiki answer"? I don't get "1000 score in 200 non-wiki answers".
    – gracey209
    Commented Sep 7, 2015 at 23:19
  • Well, in a nutshell - community wiki posts have lower reputation requirements for editing, and votes on them don't affect the reputation of the author as on normal posts. There's more information on it here and this is an example of a wiki answer on meta (although you wouldn't earn reputation from it anyway, because it's a meta post).
    – jimsug
    Commented Sep 7, 2015 at 23:22
  • Ok so when you say "community" you mean like on law meta but "normal" post is like law SE?
    – gracey209
    Commented Sep 7, 2015 at 23:24
  • Btw...,these links are super helpful. thanks.
    – gracey209
    Commented Sep 7, 2015 at 23:31
  • Community wiki posts can be created anywhere - on Law SE Main, it might be an on-topic question where we want it to be more easily editable.
    – jimsug
    Commented Sep 7, 2015 at 23:38
  • So who determines what becomes a community post? The community or the author? Or is that just a moderator function?
    – gracey209
    Commented Sep 7, 2015 at 23:42
  • @gracey209 When you post an answer, there's a little checkbox below the answer box on the right-hand side that is labeled "community wiki." The post author and diamond moderators can make an answer community wiki; only moderators can make a question community wiki, and only moderators can remove CW (so if you make an answer CW, there are no takebacks short of mod action.). It's not terribly common, but is nice if an answer is a true collaboration between several users (with normal posts, only the author is really supposed to make changes to the substance; with CW, anyone is allowed to).
    – cpast
    Commented Sep 11, 2015 at 3:54
  • Oh, jeez I can't believe I've ever noticed that! Thanks.
    – gracey209
    Commented Sep 11, 2015 at 3:59
  • Can you do it after the fact, or only before? What's the benefit to the author? The group editing? Can't anyone suggest even substantive edits if they want to?
    – gracey209
    Commented Sep 11, 2015 at 4:03
  • Oh scratch that, I see. If a bunch of people contribute, they can all get credit rather than just the one author
    – gracey209
    Commented Sep 11, 2015 at 4:04
  • its sort of bizarre that someone with a very low reputation could edit a CW. That seems like the type of thing you would want only testing users messing around with (unless edits are subject to moderator approval) then it makes sense. I need to read the link jimsug left to look at.
    – gracey209
    Commented Sep 11, 2015 at 4:07

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