43

With the tag page changed, there are some.. let's call them "controversial" opinions whether it's an improvement or not; I'd rather not comment on that, but point out a certain "feature" in the tag excerpts wikis which are shown on the \tags page:

Case in point from the TeX-SE tags page:

https://tex.stackexchange.com/tags?page=2&tab=popular

enter image description here

The [header-footer] tag wiki excerpt reads:

TeX and friends give you the resources to put text in the header and footer of your document. This tag is for questions relating to this.

Huh?

I thought it was just someone was being lazy not providing a proper tag description. But it turned out that this happens on a lot more tags, to a different degree. The layout script, or whatever it is, tries to be clever, and removes some stuff in front of the tag excerpts to avoid repetition, presumably.

The cases I noticed so far:

  • "Questions tagged with [foo]"
  • "This tag is about"
  • "Choose this tag if your question is"
  • "Use the [foo] tag for"
  • "[foo] is"
  • "This tag"

.. and probably more, I'm too lazy to search.

The point is -- the script tries to be clever and removes whole sentences, leaving weird and incomplete description, which is what tag wikis are all about.

Now, the questions:

  • Is this or a bug?
  • How exactly does it work?
  • What template for tag excerpts should we use to avoid ridiculous entries like the one shown?
Improve this question
3

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
-20

The layout script, or whatever it is, tries to be clever, and removes some stuff in front of the tag excerpts to avoid repetition, presumably

Correct.

You can take a look at the tags on

  • stackoverflow.com
  • superuser.com
  • serverfault.com

(all page 1 only, for now)

to get a sense of what the "avoid repetition" regex is looking for. More detail:

^.{0,40}?
(
(this\stag\s(is)?\s?)  # this tag .. this tag is|about ...
|
(used\sto\s)           # this tag is used to ...
|
(the\s[^\s]+\stag\s)   # the {foo} tag ...
|
(the\stag\s[^\s]+)     # the tag {foo} ...
|
(\s(is|are)\s)         # blah blah blah is|are ...
)

Test set

Python is a dynamically and strongly typed programming language that encourages readability ...

{header-footer} is about the resources TeX and friends give you to put text in the header and footer of your document ...

PlayStation 3, often abbreviated PS3, is a popular video-game console by Sony, released on 2006 ...

Use the [foo] tag for stuff ...

Choose this tag if your question is about stuff ...

This tag is about stuff ...

Django, "the web framework for perfectionists with deadlines", is a Python-based framework for creating web applications. With a ...

HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the predominant markup language used for creating web pages. In ...

XML (Extensible Markup Language) is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. ...

This tag is used for questions about developing for Microsoft Windows using the Win32 API. The Win32 ...

Eclipse is an IDE - primarily used for Java - with a very large user base and ecosystem. See "about ...

The tex-core tag refers to questions that are independent of formats and macro packages ...

Adobe Flash is a cross-platform multimedia runtime used to embed animations, video, and interactive ...

Silverlight is Microsoft's cross-browser, cross platform plug-in for media experiences and rich inte ...

Choose this tag if your question is about specific symbols, for instance ...

Xcode is Apple's integrated development environment (IDE) for development for its Mac OS X ([osx] ...

This tag indicates that the bug/feature/observation it is attached to is intentional and not subject ...

The {floats} tag deals with the floating environments `figure` and `table` as well as with custom-made floats, and 

This tag is for basic questions about probability and for questions in which one wants a probability or ...

We'll certainly tweak it, but repetition is really bad on that page and has to be removed. I recommend reworking your page 1 tag wiki excerpts to at least have common patterns in wording.

Improve this answer
5
  • 27
    I understand the motivation, but why do you think a regex is a good solution for this? If I understand correctly, you're trying to remove the subject from the excerpt sentence. That's natural language parsing. For the same reason you wouldn't parse HTML with regex, you shouldn't parse English with regex. This kind of collateral damage isn't surprising. The question is, is it worth it?
    – ire_and_curses
    Mar 11, 2011 at 17:36
  • 14
    Why not leverage the community instead, as you have done so successfully in other places, and encourage them by site mechanics to fix the page to display excerpts with less repetition?
    – ire_and_curses
    Mar 11, 2011 at 17:37
  • 9
    This is actively harmful. We have to keep rephrasing our tag wikis on Japanese.SE until we find a way to put it that doesn't hide the Japanese translation we put at the beginning of each one. And in many cases the readability suffers, since we're unable to use is or are and have to phrase things less naturally. Plus, it's terrible UI.
    – user215040
    Jun 29, 2015 at 20:08
  • What is the current status of this (April 2017)? Excerpts that start with the tag name seem to exist, with a fairly large date range, suggesting that this replacement is no longer happening? I ask because this post is linked via meta.stackexchange.com/a/101621 which was recently cited in a series of excerpt suggested edit comments by a user removing redundant starts (which, fwiw, I agree with, but I like making sure things being linked to now are still up to date).
    – Jason C
    Apr 30, 2017 at 22:38
  • 2
    Your current regexp is breaking "DO NOT USE THIS TAG for ..." because it displays it as "for ...", giving the total opposite desired guidance. meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/370908/…
    – Cœur
    Jul 14, 2018 at 10:44
29

This is a bug.

As ire_and_curses suggests, repetitious tag wiki excerpts should be edited.

Often people try to convey useful information before the word "is", for example here. Mangling them automatically will silently mess this up, displaying a tag summary that may make no sense. It forces you to rephrase to circumvent the mangling.

Improve this answer
2

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .