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Yaakov Ellis StaffMod
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caird coinheringaahing
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Please stop mangling tag wiki excerpts

Currently, tag wiki excerpts are mangled when shown in the tags list. For example, from CodeGolf.SE meta:

new users meta tag rules tag enter image description here

Not even the prefilled status tags are exempt ():

enter image description here

For reference, the excerpts are

For questions related to users that are new to CGCC. (new-users)

Indicates you are proposing new rules or asking for clarification on other ones. (rules)

Questions about what sort of questions are appropriate for PPCG. (scope)

Indicates that a change in functionality is currently under consideration, or needs further investigation. (status-review)

I could find some more examples on other sites, but they're trivial enough to find on any decent sized site.

I understand and agree with the intent behind cropping the displayed tag wiki. Wikis starting with phrases such as

  • "This tag is for ..."
  • "[tag-name] is ..."
  • "The [tag-name] tag is ..."

aren't necessary to show when displaying tag wiki excerpts. However, the currently used regex is awful. So long as any of the phrases are found within the first 50 or so characters, the regex is matched, causing the weird truncations shown. Not only does it display weirdly - making it more confusing for new users to appropriately tag questions - but it also causes editors to find weird phrases in order to avoid these truncations. Finally, one of the matches is literally

(\s(is|are)\s)         # blah blah blah is|are ...

which is just downright stupid. You can't use the words "is" or "are" within the first 40 characters in a tag wiki. I genuinely cannot think of a solid reason behind this. It just seems non-sensical.

For example, on the tag on CGCC, it took me 4 revisions to finally get it to produce a reasonable excerpt, and even then, the formatting isn't great.

Additionally, it completely breaks tags that have "Do not use this tag for ..." in their excerpts, which is counter productive to the entire point of both tag wiki excerpts and these warnings.

The original post about mangling tags is from 2011, over 10 years ago, and the accepted answer by Jeff has a net score of -14. Clearly, this system is outdated and unpopular, and doesn't even achieve its intended goal.

Therefore, please, can we at least modify the regex used to mangle the excerpts? Even better, could we change the script that mangles them to only strip specific words or phrases from the start of excerpts, so that they aren't mangled half-way through, and only remove the first few words?