User blog comment:Rappy 4187/Technical Update: February 17, 2015/@comment-11842624-20150219144818/@comment-452-20150219145522

Also, the line-height is set to equal to the height, which is why there is a huge gap above the date, and why when the title stretches to 2 lines, then date overlaps the next title.

However, there's no way something that obvious could have gotten through testing without being noticed, so I've concluded that this is exactly how Wikia want it to look.