When we rolled out our tag synonym and tag wiki support, I belatedly realized that tags were, completely by accident, third-class citizens in our ecosystem.
By that, I mean tags had no real page to themselves. Think about it -- if someone asked you about the [java] tag on Stack Overflow, where would you send them? You can certainly link to all questions tagged Java, but there was no destination for the tag itself.
Well, no longer. We've just rolled out much more comprehensive support for tag pages across the entire network.
Clicking on a given tag …
… will always take you to a list of questions with that tag, as it always has, but you'll notice a new banner at the top of the page.
This banner shows an excerpt of the tag wiki, as well as directly linking to..
- the full wiki for this tag
- the list of faq questions for this tag
- statistics for this tag
- hot answers in this tag
- new answers in this tag
- synonyms for this tag
The wiki, statistics, and synonyms aren't new, but we are continuing to progressively enhance them.
FAQ questions
The more highly linked a question is -- that is, it contains simple hyperlinks to or from another question on the site -- the more strongly it is considered a "frequently asked question" for its tag. Bottom line, if you want questions to appear on the FAQ for that tag, link to them from other questions!
Hot answers
Answers are considered hot for a tag when they are top-voted, not community wiki, and of sufficient length. Note that you can specify a time period of a day, week, month, year, or all time; what was hot today may not be hot for this week or month.
New answers
It's exactly what you might think -- a simple chronological list of new answers provided within the tag, right now.
(You'll note that we have a newly found focus on answers. We've realized that we spent so much time surfacing great questions in our engine that we really weren't giving great answers the publicity they often deserve. So we set out to fix that here!)
If you're up to a bit of gardening in the tag of your choice, now you have a great destination hub to do exactly that -- in the tag pages. Getting to the tag pages is a bit more fiddly than I might like at the moment. We're still honing the navigation, but you can always form the URL manually …
http://stackoverflow.com/tags/xml http://stackoverflow.com/tags/xml/info http://stackoverflow.com/tags/xml/faq http://stackoverflow.com/tags/xml/stats http://stackoverflow.com/tags/xml/hot http://stackoverflow.com/tags/xml/new
… or, just remember to click the links at the top of the page when browsing tagged questions.