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Tag wiki excerpts are plain text, they allow no formatting whatsoever. In particular, there are no hyperlinks in tag wiki excerpts.

Including a hyperlink in a tag wiki excerpt is a common mistake. It would be easy to block them server-side.

If a suggested edit or direct edit for a tag wiki excerpt includes the substring http:// or https://, please reject it outright, with a clear message (something like “Hyperlinks and other formatting are not supported in tag wiki excerpts.”).

(The tag wiki excerpts for url and http on SO and SU don't include any hyperlink, so I think it's safe to say that no excerpt needs to include text that happens to look like a hyperlink.)

This could be generalized to other attempts at formatting, but the risk of false positives may be too high.

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  • Isn't that why tag-wiki edit is given to trusted users only and otherwise the users have to pass through a review queue?
    – hjpotter92
    Nov 20, 2013 at 12:50
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    @hjpotter92 Even if reviewers were perfect, their time shouldn't be wasted rejecting edits that are obviously wrong. In practice, not only are reviewers ahem imperfect, but it's easy to miss in the review queue that you're dealing with an excerpt rather than a body — I know it's happened to me several times, and I'm an experienced and conscientious reviewer.
    – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
    Nov 20, 2013 at 13:01
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    Related counter-request: Allow hyperlinks in tag wiki excerpts
    – Stevoisiak
    May 13, 2017 at 22:38

1 Answer 1

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While not particularly common, there are some scenarios where it makes sense to include a URL in a tag excerpt. For example, take the following Super User tags.

Ubuntu

Free, open-source operating system based on Debian GNU/Linux. Ubuntu questions are on topic here, but if you prefer an Ubuntu-only audience there is Ask Ubuntu.

Google-docs

Better asked at WebApps.StackExchange.com unless specifically involving your computer setup.

Microsoft-outlook

Email client, calendar/appointment manager and address book/contacts list software. Not to be confused with outlook.com, the new name/interface for Hotmail.

There may be an argument for restricting the use of http:// or https://, but I think these examples show why hyperlinks shouldn't be blocked altogether.

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    That's an argument for rendering hyperlinks. But right now the hyperlinks are not rendered, they're just shown as a string of characters like any other text. So you see e.g. Ask Ubuntu (http://askubuntu.com/) and confused with outlook.com, and these are not hyperlinks.
    – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
    Apr 14, 2017 at 7:25
  • @Gilles If we were specifically blocking hyperlinks, I suppose http://askubuntu.com could be changed to askubuntu.com
    – Stevoisiak
    Apr 14, 2017 at 14:05
  • Just a note: SE uses network-wide HTTPS, so I made the appropriate changes.
    – Ollie
    Nov 6, 2020 at 23:41

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