The Description2 extension adds a description meta tag for articles automatically based on the content. This functionality appears to have been removed from MediaWiki at some point. There are some situations where description extraction (by entities less sophisticated than Google, like Facebook) will extract the wrong description information from the wiki and use something like the sitenotice as the description for a page instead of its content. This extension also adds the description to the parser output in a way that other extensions can make use of (to say provide description in a different format like Extension:OpenGraphMeta does, or perhaps to use it in article lists on the wiki).

Installation [ edit ]

Download and place the file(s) in a directory called Description2 in your extensions/ folder.

in your folder. Add the following code at the bottom of your LocalSettings.php: wfLoadExtension ( 'Description2' ); $wgEnableMetaDescriptionFunctions = true ;

Done – Navigate to Special:Version on your wiki to verify that the extension is successfully installed.

To users running MediaWiki 1.29 or earlier:

The instructions above describe the new way of installing this extension using wfLoadExtension() . If you need to install this extension on these earlier versions (MediaWiki 1.29 and earlier), instead of wfLoadExtension( 'Description2' ); , you need to use:

require_once " $IP /extensions/Description2/Description2.php" ;

Extra options [ edit ]

If you set $wgEnableMetaDescriptionFunctions = true; in your LocalSettings.php a <metadesc> tag and a {{description2:}} parser function can be used to control the description outputted for the page and override it with a custom one. You can use these parser extensions like so:

<metadesc>This is a description</metadesc> <metadesc content="This is a description" /> {{#description2:This is a description}}

They all do the same thing, <metadesc> is supported so that Description2 can be used as a replacement for Extension:MetaDescriptionTag. The content="" feature was an extra added since it didn't take much to add and was described that way on Extension:MetaDescriptionTag's documentation page even though it appears merely to be a mistake in the examples. You can use the description2 parser function instead of using #tag to provide a description tag you can control with a template's variables.

Algorithm [ edit ]

Description is extracted from the HTML representation of a page:

Remove all <table> elements (and its contents). Find all <p> elements. Iterate over those paragraphs, stripping out all HTML tags and trimming whitespace around it. The first non-empty paragraph (after all previous transformation) is picked as the description.

Things to consider:

When using templates at the top of the articles, if you use <div> instead of tables for the template, be sure it doesn't render paragraphs, which otherwise will be used as the description. This may happen if you have several <div> inside the template with newlines.