How can a moderator clear a tag wiki or excerpt?

Question

From time to time, we come across plagiarized content in tag wikis or excerpts that we want to delete. Ideally, we'd rewrite it to something non-plagiarized, but we're not subject-matter experts on every subject, and we don't always have time to research it enough to write one with useful usage guidance.

Unfortunately, trying to edit out all the content results in an error:

Apparently, it is sometimes possible to do a rollback to an empty first revision; however, this option isn't always available:

How can a moderator reliably delete the content of a tag wiki or excerpt?

Answer 1

Tags whose first real revision was a suggested edit will have a blank first revision, attributed to Community, that you can roll back to without any fuss. For tags whose first revision was submitted as a binding edit by a user with 20k+ reputation, though, that's not an option, so you need a bit of a more convoluted method. This will remove both the main tag wiki and the usage guidance (excerpt), though; if you want to preserve one of them, you'll need to either save the text somewhere or find it later at /admin/orphan-wikis.

This has been tested and proven to work. There are three main steps:

1. First, create a new tag with a blank excerpt. It does have to be added to a question for this to work. So, for example, create a new tag tag-wiki-fix on a question.

2. Secondly, merge the tag with the plagiarized wiki into the new tag. If william-shakespeare has the plagiarized wiki, merge william-shakespeare into tag-wiki-fix.

   This can be done from /admin/merge-tags. Set the tag with the wiki you want to remove (i.e., william-shakespeare) as the "source tag" and the new tag you just created (tag-wiki-fix) as the "target tag".

   

3. Thirdly, merge them back the other way - rename tag-wiki-fix to william-shakespeare. As with a normal tag rename, you don't need to actually add the properly named tag to a question for this step.

These steps will orphan the tag wiki that was originally at william-shakespeare, leaving you with a blank wiki. The removed tag wiki and excerpt can then be found at /admin/orphan-wikis (unless that page happens to be broken or overloaded).