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I notice that the excerpts at the top of tag question lists have been replaced by (the first few lines of) the text of the full tag wiki. For example, see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/xml.

So something has changed. It no longer works as described in the "What are Tag Wikis?" sidebar at https://stackoverflow.com/edit-tag-wiki/19.

Is this intentional?

The following screen shot illustrates one problem:

https://i.sstatic.net/VqdVI.jpg

More examples: The and tags have wiki excerpts, but no full tag wikis. The excerpts used to be displayed on the "Tagged Questions" pages, but now it says "The [tag] tag has no wiki summary, can you help us create it?". These tags do have summaries, they are just not shown anymore.

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  • Your question is why the excerpts are not showing up but the start of the full description?
    – Oded
    Commented Feb 1, 2012 at 14:14
  • Yes, that's what I'm asking.
    – mzjn
    Commented Feb 1, 2012 at 14:44

4 Answers 4

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I rolled back this change, this is probably the last check in from me. It will now display the excerpt, as it always did.

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  • 3
    I suspect we'll eventually want something closer to the <!--endintro--> comment you suggested, but more thought needs to be put into the layout of that page first. You took the tags page from a simple list to a reasonable tag homepage... I guess someone else will run with it now.
    – Shog9 Mod
    Commented Jun 15, 2012 at 14:38
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    "the last check in from me" :(
    – BoltClock's a Unicorn Mod
    Commented Jun 15, 2012 at 16:41
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Wow, I really don't like this.

You lose control over what gets displayed in the question list blurb. It would have been better if, for example, the XML blurb had simply stopped at the paragraph break, or a separate space had been provided for the blurb text. As it is, the text is going to get cut off in all sorts of awkward ways.

I think I know why this was done; the tag wiki excerpt is intended for the tag dropdowns, as guidance for users on how to properly use the tags. It's not really an introduction, as such.

But it would have been better to have provided a new field for the introductory text, or establish a convention that the first paragraph of text in the tag wiki body serve as the introduction.

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  • 1
    I don't mind changing this back, the concept was to drive people to visit wikis more. Excerpts are bad invitations.
    – waffles
    Commented Feb 2, 2012 at 11:17
  • @waffles: Can you stop adding text to the description after the first paragraph break? As you can see by the example the OP gave, mashing multiple paragraphs together can be unpredictable. If this can be done, I prefer the first paragraph of the tag wiki body over the tag wiki excerpt.
    – user102937
    Commented Feb 2, 2012 at 15:52
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    too many tag wikis start with a very short line in a single paragraph. Does adding a "special marker" for end of intro work for you? eg: `<!--endintro--> it would be a trivial change.
    – waffles
    Commented Feb 6, 2012 at 1:58
  • @waffles: That would be excellent.
    – user102937
    Commented Feb 6, 2012 at 15:37
  • @waffles: "the concept was to drive people to visit wikis more. Excerpts are bad invitations.". OK, that seems like a reasonable motivation. But is there more to this "concept" than that? Is it elaborated somewhere?
    – mzjn
    Commented Feb 8, 2012 at 17:14
  • @mzjn, I am going to revert it in a few days once my current round of changes have settled in, and see if it has any negative impact ... hold tight
    – waffles
    Commented Feb 8, 2012 at 21:24
  • Any news on this @waffles? I'm still seeing this.
    – Georg Fritzsche
    Commented Mar 2, 2012 at 9:11
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I just stumbled on this (since a user is just providing some tag wikis, and I'm approving and editing them).

This would be less annoying if it didn't loose all formatting from the blurb of text which is displayed there.

While our current tag wikis on crypto SE are not great ...

enter image description here

... the unformatted version is even worse:

enter image description here

Could we get a formatted preview?

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0

I think it is; it happens when you search questions with that tag. If you look for a random word, say code for example, it won't appear. :)

I suppose it appears so people can read it, edit, improve it, etc.

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