We don't currently generate meta description tags for our article, which means we're trusting fallible search engines to find a snippet in the article. While this task should be trivial -- just grab the first 150 characters of the article! -- it doesn't appear to be e.g. the current enwiki entry for Barack Obama:

And it gets particularly hard given our tendency toward IPA codes e.g.:

Google cleans these up in its extracts of the Wikipedia article in the Knowledge Graph box which makes our odd snippet look even odder:

Should we generate meta description tags and add to the head of pages? Been discussed before (e.g. https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T14196 from 2007) but feels like an easy opportunity to improve the way many users first see a Wikipedia article (in search results).