Issue: Wiki Summary field (Meta description)

This already exists. IIRC, I believe you customized your vw_editor_page template to remove it.

VW almost has Wiki summary functionality. A few things would be needed for it:
1. rename the field to 'Summary'
2. place the field above the main editor
3. make the field a multi-line text field.
4. lower the maximum to 158 chars
5. use the content of this field for autolinks IF the field has content.

1. No one currently fills in the "Meta Description" on my site. Absolutely no one. Is this hurting my SEO? When the field was added old articles had it autopopluated with some content.
2. I do not want another mandatory field to be filled out by all users anyway. Even if renamed Summary it must be optional. The size of the editor box for the summary should not be so large as to detract from getting users to fill in content. People on forums are not usually as wiki savvy as wikipedia editors and I've tried my very hardest to streamline people into adding content
3. If not filled in then the article MUST continue to generate autolink previews without the Summary/meta description

1. No one understands what "Meta Description" is. People will understand what a "Summary" is. More people will fill that in, which means that these descriptions will be displayed in google search results. If those summaries are interesting to the user, then more users will click on it and visit your website. Having no meta description means that a cut-off text is displayed. Having no good meta description generally will lead to less traffic.
Watch this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzxnwSR3i8A
Example of how VW has bad meta descriptions which do not explain the pages well and will not lead to high click trough rate:
https://www.google.com/search?&q=sit...ki.org%2Fpages

2. I completely agree: it must be optional, not mandatory. Otherwise is will just bother people and make it harder to use wiki.

3. Agreed. Thats how it should work.

So whilst I find SEO sales people to be the modern snake oil salesmen, I do entirely agree with the above

Outlandish, but is there a way vaultwiki could also incorporate the summary into a variable that could be added back into the page in the same way as the title? That could be very handy for some of my templates.

Actually it would be nice to just have a setting to display the summary at the top of the article.

Renaming the field to summary would be an easy change. I'm not sure yet how easy moving the field would be.

You mention using the summary content for link previews. Note that summaries do not support BB-Code, so the previews would be somewhat dumbed down from what they are now; this change should be an option. I'm unclear what would be the desired behavior for section links (which preview the section text currently), since that would become inconsistent with the behavior of regular link previews, and sections don't have separate summaries to pull from.

Summary is already present on wiki content variables (varies depending on the template) via the "summary" key. So for vw_node_shell, which is where you would probably use it in XF2, it would be accessed like {$node.summary}. I imagine you would want to insert it either above or below the line for {$node.below} in the p-description block. IIRC, feed descriptions already appear here, so that might cause a double-description on feeds if you simply edited this template. The page description was not placed here by default since the values carried over from VW 4.0.x tended to mostly be duplicates of the page content.

Thanks for pointing out that wiki pages with empty summary fields reverting to the site description is not a desirable behavior. So far, I only see this happening on my vBulletin boards; I'll see if there's an easy way to fix.

I'm not sure I would lower the maximum as a hard value. Historically the recommended length of this field by search engines and other experts has been all over the place from over 300 characters to under 140 characters. A few years back 192 was the maximum some engines would show (but they might index the full value). Google tends to revise their guidelines every few years. Any change we would make would only apply to new edits -- much like if you were to change the Maximum characters for wiki content to 100, it would not let you save future edits until you came under the new maximum, but it would not destroy your page history.

For both summary and I realize even content where the maximum is different between versions, I am not clear what should happen if you tried to roll back... nor am I sure what the desired behavior would be (error: can't rollback to that version because it exceeds the maximum allowed characters)? Not sure it rises to a Permissions Escalation, because it's not like you're adding new content over the maximum, and really only moderators should be able to roll back, and one might expect moderators to be able to bypass certain limits in their official capacity (but should moderators be above the law?)

Maybe adding a setting for the maximum characters so webmasters can decide and adjust. I think once a summary has been written and a lower maximum chars has been set, it should not affect existing text, but only newly entered text.

In the next release, changed the behavior of vBulletin boards using the default forum description for all wiki pages without a summary. This change creates an inconsistent behavior (by design, all non-forum content, and all content/threads in forums with no description, use the default forum description in vBulletin), but is better for wiki page SEO.

The rest of this needs some more thought so probably will not have time to make it into the next release.

I wouldn't use it though if it was a separate section.

For 90% of my wiki pages (and most public wiki) the best place for the summary is alongside the infobox (or below it on mobile view).

I like that the field has a character counter. It would be nice to display the characters allowed and the number used. This would make it easier for the user to adjust the text.

In the next release, the editor row text has been changed from "Meta description" to "Summary". Also, since this field is used as various description metadata (meta, OG, schema.org, etc) that may have varying maximum lengths, no change to the allowed characters has been made. Rather, the field value will simply be truncated as needed when it is used. For example, when this value is actually used as the page's meta description, it will be truncated to no more than 160 characters, with an ellipsis.