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Lately we have seen large number of tag wiki edit suggestion in the review queue.

Many of the proposed edits are simple copy/paste from wikipedia. Whilst the information contained in them may be factually true, I think we should not fill our tag wiki's with this information.

Generally the wikipedia text is not written from an aviation perspective.

This should be picked up in review, please be a bit considerate before you hit the approve button.

Some examples:

Countries:

From an aviation perspective it is hardly interesting what the area of a country is, what kind of political system it has or what the size of its population is. What would be interesting to know is: the name of the national aviation authority, the ICAO country code, the major airports and airlines, a link to the AIP, the country's aviation industry, the country's aviation history etc. None of that is found in the wikipedia copy/paste, yet it is happily approved in review.

e.g. ,pakistan

Fluid mechanics:

Vortex ring state is an aerodynamic phenomena that can occur when a helicopter is hovering. The naming of the state comes from the vortex ring, which is a fluid mechanical phenomena. Our - tag wiki now doesn't even mention the helicopter because of the copy/pasting. Yet it was happily approved in review.

Ambiguous terms

Sometimes a term has more than one meaning. When we use one meaning when applying the tag, and another meaning to describe the tag all consistency is lost.

Example: means cockpit in our site, but deck of an aircraft carrier on wikipedia. So we have a wiki description that doesn't fit the meaning at all, yet it was happily approved in review.

Let's try and keep the quality of this site at a high level

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  • $\begingroup$ related: meta.aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/1595 $\endgroup$
    – Federico
    Commented Jun 24, 2015 at 21:17
  • $\begingroup$ You and I both rejected the Pakistan edit on June 19th. It must have been resubmitted. :-( $\endgroup$
    – David Richerby
    Commented Jun 26, 2015 at 20:37
  • $\begingroup$ And the user who made it has their account suspended at the moment for voting irregularities. *sigh* $\endgroup$
    – David Richerby
    Commented Jun 26, 2015 at 20:38
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    $\begingroup$ @DavidRicherby I have directed a comment to this user personally to give him some guidance on how to write wiki entries. He improved a little but didn't take up the feedback that was given through the rejected posts. Indeed everything that was rejected was resubmitted later without change and then approved by others. That led me to write this post. Shortly afterwards he was suspended. The user seems too eager to boost his reputation and tries to achieve that through unfair play. Note he made number of good contributions as well, I hope he learns from this and improves his behaviour. $\endgroup$
    – DeltaLima Mod
    Commented Jun 26, 2015 at 20:58
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    $\begingroup$ The flight-deck tag was only used for that one question, while cockpit is used for many questions. So, I just retagged the single flight-deck tag; a synonym may be justified, but actual questions about the little room in the front of the plane where the pilots sit are in fact tagged as cockpit. However, that's not important right now (the point is the bad wikis). $\endgroup$
    – cpast
    Commented Jun 29, 2015 at 5:26

3 Answers 3

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I do notice that recently there seems to be a large number of tag edits by the same users repeatedly. Likely they are doing this for +2 rep.

Many tags excerpts are simply copied from Wikipedia, most of which I rejected. Many of the tags are only used in one question, and its excerpt filled by the same user who used it in a question.

I agree with Farhan - we should start cleaning up these tags. Tags are meant to categorize questions. If certain tags are very specific or only used in a very few questions, we should ask ourselves if the tag is really necessary.

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I agree with your analysis and suggestion completely. I was the culprit of approving the China wiki. The truth is that I did not think in the terms you mentioned.

This problem is because:

  • In beta sites, users with just 1500 rep can approve wiki tags (5000 in graduated sites). Hence, more people have the opportunity to just approve tags but will not realize why a certain excerpt is not suitable.
  • Users below 1500 rep try to get 2 points for each edit, so they might not think twice whether an edit is useful or not.

To fix this, in addition to being vigilant about future approvals, we need to look at existing tags to make sure that they are appropriate to the theme of this site. Similar to fixing question title task we did, we can start doing this too.

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  • $\begingroup$ I like the suggestion to improve some wiki's like we did with the titles. Maybe we can group it by theme (e.g. countries first) and have a meta discussion on what information a good wiki should contain. $\endgroup$
    – DeltaLima Mod
    Commented Jun 23, 2015 at 16:04
  • $\begingroup$ @DeltaLima We can have some template for country tags. The things you mentioned (in your question) can be a start, if someone doesn't consider it complete. $\endgroup$
    – Farhan
    Commented Jun 23, 2015 at 16:12
  • $\begingroup$ Even higher-rep users get the +2 rep for tag edits: I just undid the China and Pakistan entries and gained rep for that, even though I'm at ~3100. $\endgroup$
    – David Richerby
    Commented Jun 26, 2015 at 21:02
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I saw a couple of those in the review queue and did not approve them for mostly the reasons you mention. Additionally, in the case of and , the only use case was a single question of, frankly, not the best quality.

Honestly, it seems like country tags haven't had the best track record. While there are valid uses of , for example, in a brief glance through it, I also saw several instances where it was either used redundantly with or where should have been used instead (or where the tag was just entirely superfluous or the question itself wasn't even on-topic for Aviation.SE.)

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  • $\begingroup$ It's possible to imagine non-regulatory questions that are specific to the USA. $\endgroup$
    – David Richerby
    Commented Jun 29, 2015 at 9:00
  • $\begingroup$ @DavidRicherby Agreed. Those are the valid uses I mentioned. However, many, if not most, of the questions I saw with usa didn't fall into that category. $\endgroup$
    – reirab
    Commented Jun 29, 2015 at 13:33

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