[sorry, resending, got mistakenly posted in a reply thread earlier]
70% of web traffic on any page of my wiki (I assume the same is true for most other wikis and sites) comes from a search engine. In search results, people see two things and use them to decide in a few seconds whether to click on the link or not:
1- page title
2- meta tag description (if defined) OR the first sentence of the page.
#1, the page title is fine in Mediawiki. It is: {{PAGENAME}} - "the wiki name".
#2 is not right. For example if we search "America", we see:
- "This article is about the United States of America. For other uses of terms redirecting here, see US (disambiguation), USA (disambiguation), ..."
Ideally this should be something that the editors put into the page like other article text.Let them handle the description such as "An article about the USA, its history, government and politics, culture, economy and other topics". This is better than the disamb. notice that comes up currently in search.
We can install an external extension to define meta description however this should be a built-in feature of Mediawiki where people should be able to use: <metadesc> for making sure our search engine results are what we want them to be.
Eric