<p>I find tag wiki excerpts <em>extremely</em> useful, much more so than full wikis (I doubt that many people ever come across full wikis because SE design buries them quite deep).</p>

<p>When I write wiki excerpts I have been trying to put as much information in it as possible given the strict limit of 460 characters. If a wiki excerpt is much shorter than that, I usually try to expand it until it reaches the maximal capacity, because that's how I believe it will be most useful. When I mouse-over a tag I prefer to get <em>more</em> information and not <em>less</em>.</p>

<p>For example, I have very recently written tag wiki excerpts for <a href="https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/elastic-net" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged &#39;elastic-net&#39;" rel="tag">elastic-net</a> and <a href="https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/total-least-squares" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged &#39;total-least-squares&#39;" rel="tag">total-least-squares</a>; both approach this hard length limit and both were approved by the community.</p>

<p>Today I rewrote tag wiki excerpt for <a href="https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/distance-covariance" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged &#39;distance-covariance&#39;" rel="tag">distance-covariance</a>, but <a href="https://stats.stackexchange.com/posts/177139/revisions">my edit was edited</a> and strongly shortened by @whuber with the comment </p>

<blockquote>
  <p>Excerpt was too long: moved excess material to the wiki itself.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>I am unhappy about it because the excess material moved to the main wiki will be seen by almost nobody, whereas in the excerpt I think it could be useful. <strong>I thought that there can't be such thing as "too long" an excerpt:</strong> the upper limit is given by the 460 allowed characters, and any length below that is not too long.</p>

<p>What is the optimal length of tag wiki excerpts? What is the appropriate level of detail? The more detailed the better (as I thought)? Or the more concise the better (as per @whuber's comment)?</p>
