Wikipedia talk:Short description: Difference between revisions

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Template:Short description

Archive 1

Why not? It's ridiculous to be populating this template from wikidata, just to have two copies. We should load directly. Andy Dingley (talk) 16:30, 17 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Andy Dingley: One reason why not is that the "description" field on Wikidata is unsuitable to use as a source for content on the English Wikipedia. Another reason is that Wikidata doesn't offer the protection for biographies that English Wikipedia does. When Wikidata has descriptions that are sourceable and has a BLP policy comparable to that on English Wikipedia, you'll find no objections to loading directly from me. Until then, this kind of rush to insert unsuitable content just fuels the paranoia of all those who would gladly see no content drawn from Wikidata at all. Have you forgotten Wikipedia:Wikidata/2018 Infobox RfC so quickly? --RexxS (talk) 19:19, 17 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Maybe related, maybe not - is this edit useful? -- Begoon 16:57, 9 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  @Begoon: The best way to look at these sort of questions is to consider what happens when the short description is used. One of three things can occur: (1) On the Wikipedia app, the article List of video games notable for negative reception has a subtitle "Wikimedia list article"; (2) When searching Wikipedia on the mobile platform for "List of v ", one suggestion is List of video games notable for negative reception with the line "Wikimedia list article" beneath it; (3) The annotated link to List of video games notable for negative reception looks like this:

  • List of video games notable for negative reception

  I don't think any of those results is particularly useful, because the title already clearly indicates what the article is, so the short descriptions aren't going to help anyone decide if that is the article they were looking for. On the other hand, I don't think that the {{short description}} is harmful, and it does protect the article from vandalism originating from Wikidata. --RexxS (talk) 17:58, 10 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  Thanks, RexxS - you got me with "it does protect the article from vandalism originating from Wikidata", so I'm all in favour of it now. Would {{short description|}} (empty) "serve that purpose" too? -- Begoon 18:11, 10 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  Unfortunately, the magic word inside the template {{SHORTDESC:}} doesn't do anything without a value (the same as {{short description|none}}), so we then get the description pulled from Wikidata (naturally, that's "Wikimedia list article" for these sort of articles). Have a look at Special:Permalink/901282407 which shows the effect of omitting the description from {{short description}}. Best to leave an innocuous description in these cases, IMHO. --RexxS (talk) 21:19, 10 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  A shame. I thought I had read somewhere that infoboxes that pull parameter data from wikidata could be prevented from doing so by entering local blank parameters, |some_param=, so wondered if this might work the same way - I suppose it's different. -- Begoon 06:52, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  You did read that. The first module I coded to retrieve data from Wikidata for infoboxes had exactly that behaviour: omitting the parameter fetched from Wikidata and setting the parameter blank meant it did not appear in the infobox. Unfortunately editors are accustomed to a blank parameter and the absence of the parameter producing the same results. That meant that I got so many questions why it didn't produce what they expected that I gave in and changed the behaviour to use |fetchwikidata= and |suppressfields=, and made sure that a blank parameter gave the same results as no parameter. Presumably the devs who wrote {{SHORTDESC:}} had similar experiences. --RexxS (talk) 01:32, 12 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Noticed that we just passed this milestone. Congrats and thanks to all. UnitedStatesian (talk) 18:26, 10 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Now let's double that! Galobtter (pingó mió) 12:03, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I have tentatively joined this project and have been adding short descriptions mainly to my own articles. I am nevertheless a bit doubtful about the effectiveness of this enterprise and have not been able to find much evidence of how the short descriptions facilitate searches, etc., in practice. Can anyone point be to more extensive Wikimedia backgrgound on this or indeed on any non-Wikimedia comments on the usefulness of short descriptions.--Ipigott (talk) 16:39, 21 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Whether or not short descriptions are useful is not really the point. What counts is that they exist regardless of opinions here, and they are editable by anyone with very little oversight at Wikidata. A short description is only important for people reading Wikipedia from a mobile device. On a gadget, people find things by typing a couple of words of a subject into a search bar. They are presented with a list of titles matching those words. Each title also shows the short description (only the portion of it that fits into a short space). The short description is very helpful to decide which title is about the subject of interest. However, it is also a great way to display abuse entered by a vandal. When that is done here, it is quickly reverted and the vandal blocked. When it is done at Wikidata, no one may notice for a month because active editors generally do not use mobile devices. Therefore it is better that short descriptions are entered at Wikipedia because they override any description at Wikidata. Johnuniq (talk) 23:51, 21 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for these explanations. Can you be more specific about the portion "that fits into a short spece", for example in terms of the actual number of characters? It would be useful to know how much of a short description is actually being displayed on mobile devices.--Ipigott (talk) 07:14, 22 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I have not tested exactly what happens but I suspect the number of characters displayed is dependent on the width of the screen of the device used. I have tested on a large phone and more is displayed when the text is displayed in landscape mode. See here for some results. Johnuniq (talk) 07:44, 22 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

That's very useful. It seems to me to be important to convey the essence of the article in the first few words. I came across this Wikimedia page. It looks to me as if it needs to be updated. Do you know whether the Wikipedia EN short descriptions take precedence over those in Wikidata for mobile search purposes? Is anyone ensuring the Wikipedia short descriptions are added to Wikidata if descriptions in English are missing?--Ipigott (talk) 15:24, 22 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The descriptions here do take precedence over Wikidata, so every description added that replaces a Wikidata description reduces the attack surface for vandals. If there is no description anywhere, by default User:Galobtter/Shortdesc helper will add the description to Wikidata too. Galobtter (pingó mió) 18:35, 22 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I can’t seem to find any way to edit short descriptions of an article. I made a typo on one and I want to fix it, but it seems odd that there’s no obvious way to do that. The edit doesn’t even appear in the article’s history. CrocodilesAreForWimps (talk) 00:48, 1 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@CrocodilesAreForWimps: Please link to the page so we can see what was done. Using {{short description}}, you would edit the whole page where normally the template would be found near the top of the page. Johnuniq (talk) 03:54, 1 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Crocodilesareforwimps: (after ec) Which article are you looking at? Currently there are two ways that a short description appears on an article: either {{short description}} appears somewhere in the wikicode (in which case you should be able to search the wikitext for it, and see it in the history), or it's being displayed from Wikidata (in which case you can edit it by going to the Wikidata item for the article, or by overriding the Wikidata description using {{short description}}). You can also use a script like User:Galobtter/Shortdesc_helper. Nikkimaria (talk) 03:55, 1 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Crocodilesareforwimps, The edit you made is at [1]. (I recommend the script Nikkimaria mentioned :D) Galobtter (pingó mió) 05:58, 1 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Note, should have mentioned I was on mobile CrocodilesAreForWimps (talk) 03:34, 2 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, I've removed (This has been contested as some useful functions for wikimarkup in the short description have been proposed. There is no definitive consensus on this point.) and made some related changes to clarify that the short descriptions have to be plain text and cannot contain any wikimarkup. These descriptions are used as the equivalent of Wikidata descriptions (which are also plaintext) and displayed in various places links and formatting might not make sense (e.g. search dropdowns where tapping on the description needs to result in a different action, or non-rich-text mobile interfaces) so there's no way to render wikitext markup. (We could parse it and then convert back the results to plain text, but that is likely to introduce more problems than it would solve.)

(FWIW templates, magic words, parser functions and such do work, as long as the content they include is plain text. To be more precise, the short description gets preprocessed but does not get parsed. I did not mention templates on the page as it seemed more confusing than useful, given the intended use cases of short descriptions.) --Tgr (WMF) (talk) 18:26, 3 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Tgr: Unfortunately, I've felt obliged to revert you. The use of short descriptions is not confined to search boxes and subtitles in the App. As they are used in {{Annotated link}}, a case has been made for the usefulness of wiki-markup, in particular, wiki-links. There is as yet no consensus on the issue. Considering that you already parse the text of the short description to capitalise the initial letter of the first word (even when it's "eBay") for use in search boxes/as a subtitle, I don't see that stripping out wiki-links should be a chore (we do it with :gsub("^%[%[[^|]*|", ""):gsub("]]$", "") in Lua modules). Nevertheless, that's your call, not mine to make. I simply want you to be aware of the position, i.e. lack of consensus on wikitext here. Cheers --RexxS (talk) 23:50, 3 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks @RexxS, I wasn't aware of that usage pattern. ({{Template parameter value}} is one scary-looking template!) Stripping out wikimarkup accurately is actually not that easy in the general case (e.g. ''''x''y' is ''<i>x</i>y' but ''''x''y'' is '<b>x<i>y</i></b> - not something you can handle with a naive regex), but presumably short descriptions won't involve any complicated wikimarkup. In any case, we can always just pass it to the parser and strip HTML tags from the result (which is easy); that's a performance hit, but a small one.

Capitalization is actually more concerning; I haven't thought of that before. We do not make any capitalization changes for short descriptions; they are used exactly as they are provided. The Wikidata guidelines ask for non-sentence-case descriptions, so if enwiki short descriptions don't follow that, users will see a mix of sentence-case and lowercase descriptions - not the worst problem in the world, but still inelegant. That's not something that can be properly fixed automatically, since - as you point out - the capitalization of the first letter depends on the word too, not just the sentence casing.

On the other hand, the long-term plan (as in, it's not on anybody's roadmap currently, or formally decided, but it's widely assumed it will happen) is to move short descriptions (the ones used for search, article select and similar software features) out of wikitext and into some kind of structured data storage local to enwiki once MediWiki supports that well enough (cf. the Multi-Content Revisions project), since that allows the same workflows that exist for Wikidata descriptions, such as mobile editing. So eventually short descriptions used by the software might be detached from short descriptions used by {{Annotated link}}. In light of that, it might be easier to handle wikimarkup on the software side and accept capitalization inconsistencies for the time being. --Tgr (WMF) (talk) 10:15, 7 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]