Why doesn't the Wikipedia homepage have meta tags?

[Edward_Sturm]

Why doesn't the Wikipedia homepage have meta tags?

[MattRoney]

I'm actually seeing some in their source, notably meta charset and <title>. You're right that there's no meta description, for example, which is interesting, but they don't exactly need it. ;)</p></title>

[Edward_Sturm]

Thank you Matt. I meant to write meta description, completely my fault.

So you're saying Wikipedia's main reasoning, if you had to guess, for them not having a meta desc. would be just because they don't need it?

[GastonRiera]

Wikipedia is one of those sites that doesnt have much of SEO optimization.
Another example is the underscore in their URLs..

[MattRoney]

Well, less a reason than an explanation. To be honest, I have no idea why they didn't use meta description when first establishing the site. It stands to reason, though, that by this point they don't have much incentive to add it.

[MattRoney]

I sincerely doubt it's a strategic choice not to have one, though.

[Deacyde]

To add on to Gaston's Reply,

Wikipedia is up that Top 10 or 20 sites that could do everything wrong ( in fact some do ) regarding SEO and still rank number 1, Google's reasoning for this is basically, their too big to fail. If people started not seeing wikipedia pages, heads and traffic would roll.

So since Google knows that traffic will continue as long as certain sites are always listed, they will overlook their SEO issues.

I don't know for how long though, as I see pages from wiki that are awaiting deletion ranking on page 1 and 2 sometimes, not to mention the sometimes completely inaccurate information on some of wiki's pages, although rare doesn't boast well for SERPs relevancy.

So to put it in otherwords, Wikipedia is above the law...