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I was looking through the tag excerpts and I noticed the Etymology excerpt that appears on the Tags page doesn't match what appears on the tag pop-up tooltip, the tagged questions page, or the full wiki page's excerpt section.

I don't see anything that stands out as the reason, especially since tags like and have both kana and parenthesis in the exerpt which shows up on the page. Some long excerpts are trimmed to three sentences on the Tags page, but that's not the case here either, because there's a full line open.

Etymology excerpt in four different views

Is this a bug? Looks this way on both Chrome and IE.

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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Looks like it cuts off anything before the word "is," probably in an attempt to avoid restating the tag's name. Clever in theory but buggy in practice.

The same thing happens to , but even worse:

Applies to any question that is asked about the differences between two or more words or phrases and how to select the best one for a given situation.

becomes

asked about the differences between two or more words or phrases and how to select the best one for a given situation.

Edit: Looks like this is by design. They suggest that we rephrase our tag wikis so that their parser handles them better. :/

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  • Your keen observation seems to be the case. meta.stackexchange.com/questions/82700/…
    – Tsuyoshi Ito
    Jun 15, 2011 at 22:50
  • @Tsuyoshi Oh, ew. So they tried to make things better but seem to have made things worse...
    – Amanda S
    Jun 15, 2011 at 22:53
  • This has been annoying me too and I also thought (being a programmer) that it might be a misfeature. Maybe tag wikis should be just predicates rather than sentences and we should design them to omit anything up to and including the copula?
    – hippietrail
    Jun 16, 2011 at 0:20
  • @hippietrail That's what I started to try and do today (until I noticed this weird thing). Like in this case, I would have changed the excerpt to start with "The study of the origin..." pretty much like the tags page shows it now.
    – Troyen
    Jun 16, 2011 at 0:33
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    Does the live preview show how it will be displayed finally? If not then leaving us with a guessing game is definitely a bug to be reported. Especially for those of us who can only queue up edit suggestions and not edit and re-edit until it's perfect. (ie most of us).
    – hippietrail
    Jun 16, 2011 at 0:40
  • @hippietrail Jeff Atwood's answer includes examples, but it's unclear if this is an exhaustive list. Preview would help but I don't think it's the answer--it feels like putting lipstick on a pig. What would help more are better guidelines when writing the tag wiki in the first place--and maybe code to detect redundant phrasing as you're writing the wiki and a recommendation to get rid of it. Computers can do a lot, but humans are still better at language.
    – Amanda S
    Jun 16, 2011 at 2:45
  • @Amanda: Unfortunately I don't have a human or a Jeff Atwood here to tell me how suggested>voted>accepted edits will look so I can't address that problem but since there's code mangling the excerpts in one place but not showing what the mangling would do in the other I can at least attempt to address that problem. So I'm in the middle of filing a bug report.
    – hippietrail
    Jun 16, 2011 at 2:48
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    Feauture request officially filed: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/95323/…
    – hippietrail
    Jun 16, 2011 at 3:16

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