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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)
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)
: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)
''''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.We do not make any capitalization changes for short descriptions; they are used exactly as they are provided. Here's an experiment you can try:
novel by Herman Melville
.eBay founder, American entrepreneur and philanthropist
.Pierre O
.Novel..
and EBay...
). If you use the Wikipedia App, you can follow the link to Pierre Omidyar's article, where the subtitle begins EBay founder...
. Somebody is capitalising short descriptions, although I haven't tried following the flow to determine where that happens. My advice would be to recommend always writing Wikidata descriptions as if they were sentence fragments, i.e use an initial capital unless you have a stylised exception like "eBay" or "iPhone", etc. But that's really above my pay grade, and I can't face the argument of telling all of the Wikidatans that they've got it wrong all this time. Cheers --
RexxS (
talk)
11:32, 7 July 2019 (UTC)
Is there any prior
RfC or discussion that establishes the "target of 40 characters"
recommendation here? I noticed that both the
Android and iOS Wikipedia apps
impose a limit of 90 characters. (However, the apps only show the option to edit the short description, which they call the "title description"
, when the short description is sourced from
Wikidata, i.e. the {{
Short description}} template is not used.) —
Newslinger
talk 08:03, 11 July 2019 (UTC) Edited to correct information on the iOS app. —
Newslinger
talk
10:11, 11 July 2019 (UTC)
"Disambiguation page providing links to topics that could be referred to by the same search term", which is shown in its entirety. Are you using the latest version of the Wikipedia app, or is it different on iOS? — Newslinger talk 10:28, 11 July 2019 (UTC)
Hi all. BrownHairedGirl, changed the verbiage on where the SD should be placed, stating MOS:ORDER, which is absolutely correct. However, it was placed there with this edit, after a very brief (3 day) discussion, see [[Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Layout#Where to put {{short description}}]]. Subsequent entries on that discussion include a reversal of one editor's opinion regarding this matter. I'm not sure if we should do an RFC, but I do think that we should come to an agreement on its placement. I understand the argument from an AWB perspective, but this causes issues because Shortdesc helper puts in on the first line. While this was brought up by Kvng during the discussion, I don't think it was sufficiently addressed in the brief discussion prior to the change being made on the actual MOS:ORDER page. Onel5969 TT me 23:56, 14 July 2019 (UTC)
Can we delete the last bullet point under
Content, which says "Use sentence case for short descriptions"? This is supposed to be an information page which "describes the editing community's established practice". Sentence case is absolutely not established practice; I have edited hundreds of descriptions using the gadget on desktop, and I've hardly ever seen sentence case used. Maybe that was the intention at the start, but the rule is virtually never applied in practice.
MichaelMaggs (
talk)
20:40, 26 July 2019 (UTC)
Fragment can be reliably converted to sentence case by rote by capitalizing the first word if not already capitalizedunfortunately is not the case either - there are exceptions such as those identified by RexxS above. Nikkimaria ( talk) 18:43, 27 July 2019 (UTC)
Note that the subtitle begins with a capital. There is no short description template in the article, therefore it gets that subtitle from the description on Wikidata at Lippendorf Power Station (Q462730), which is actually "lignite-fired power station". Obviously the software has transformed the lower-case description into the sentence-case subtitle. If we addedLippendorf Power Station
Lignite-fired power station
{{
short description|Lignite-fired power station}}
to the article, there would be no need for the software to do any transforms.Note that the software has incorrectly capitalised "eBay".Pierre Omidyar
EBay founder, American entrepreneur and philanthropist
I've encountered many long "short descriptions". Most of these involve correctly defining the subject. Examples:
Belief that Earth and its lifeforms were created in their present forms by supernatural acts of a deity between approximately 6,000 and 10,000 years ago
Belief that Earth was supernaturally created just a few thousand years ago
77 Jews on a civilian convoy to the Mount Scopus enclave, including medical personnel, slaughtered by Muslim Arabs living in Sheikh Jarrah in Jerusalem against the indifference of the British forces during the inter-communal stage of the 1948 War
Arab attack on convoy bringing supplies and personal bound for Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem during 1948 War
1917–1946 ground and air warfare branch of the Soviet Union's military
Soviet army and air force from 1917–1946
When changing these, I found it helpful to focus on a short description that distinguishes the subject from other possible similar-named subjects, rather than one that defines the subject. I believe what I'm doing is in agreement with the template page guidelines, but that's not obvious. In fact, my edits may not go far enough in this (feel free to improve them, of course). So I'm asking:
Should we specifically state that a short description should focus on distinguishing the subject, rather than defining it?
And should we have few examples demonstrating this? -- A D Monroe III( talk) 17:29, 31 July 2019 (UTC)
As a first step towards this, I've [ https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Wikipedia:Short_description&diff=909338046&oldid=906254171 added] a bullet point to this effect:
* The short description should focus on distinguishing the subject from similar ones rather than precisely defining it.
This is still rather meekly stated, and examples are still TBD. -- A D Monroe III( talk) 19:41, 4 August 2019 (UTC)
An IP is busily adding the same short description to hundreds of list articles. They are all {{short description|Wikimedia list article}} which doesn't seem very helpful but I'm not a regular user of this template myself. Kerry ( talk) 01:31, 15 August 2019 (UTC)
I created
Category:Articles with long short description, for articles with short descriptions > 80 characters. Pages could be suppressed from this category by using long=yes
in the short description.
Unfortunately, this includes disambiguation pages, even when they override the default long short description with a short short description so I have reverted my changes to the template for now.
All the best:
Rich
Farmbrough,
22:30, 31 August 2019 (UTC).
In the Content section is this statement: Use sentence case for short descriptions. It is technically problematic to have to convert case when there may be proper nouns in the text.
The second sentence perplexed me. "Is it saying I should not capitalize proper nouns?" It was only until I read through this Talk page that I was able to answer that question in the negative, i.e., use sentence case, which requires capitalizing proper nouns.
To prevent flummoxing other editors, I suggest eliminating the second sentence. Guidance should be clear and direct. Explanations for the guidance are not necessary.
I did not edit the statement myself because I am new to this topic. Thanks! - Mark D Worthen PsyD (talk) (I am a man. The traditional male pronouns are fine.) 19:33, 2 September 2019 (UTC)
I've added {{Short description|none}} to several articles which have sufficiently clear titles:
Albert King discography,
Ball and Chain (Big Mama Thornton song),
Bring It On Home (Sonny Boy Williamson II song),
Come On (Earl King song),
Double Trouble (Otis Rush song),
Early in the Mornin' (Louis Jordan song),
Elmore James discography, etc. However, they continue to show a Wikidata description. Is there some other way to do this? —
Ojorojo (
talk)
16:15, 21 September 2019 (UTC)
{{u|
Mark viking}} {
Talk}
18:46, 21 September 2019 (UTC)
{{
Short description|none}}
doesn't provide a short description (obviously), so a value is fetched from Wikidata. if there was an easy way of simply turning off the Wikidata, we would have done that instead of having to supply 2,000,000 short descriptions. --
RexxS (
talk)
19:18, 21 September 2019 (UTC)
{{
Short description|none}}
may be used. However, this will not override the descriptions from Wikidata." — Ojorojo ( talk) 20:13, 21 September 2019 (UTC)
I just added {{
Short description|none}}
to an article that had no template before, and it shows up as "none". Have now replaced this with
.
Mathglot (
talk)
20:19, 14 October 2019 (UTC)
Hi, just wanted to inform you all of my intention to add a bot parameter to the template for the purposes of my bot task adding automatic short descriptions to biography articles. The plan is to categorize them additionally in hidden Category:Articles with short descrption added by {{{bot}}}. Feel free to give feedback! ‑‑ Trialpears ( talk) 21:35, 12 November 2019 (UTC)
|bot=PearBOT 5
if wanted (to indicate that the description has been checked)? Is that should remove?
Johnuniq (
talk)
22:42, 12 November 2019 (UTC)
Has anyone else seen the short description displayed twice on some pages, despite there only being one SD? I've seen this a fair bit today, and I don't recall seeing it before. Could it be linked to the update that has changed the edit summary from "Adding local short description: "foo artcile" (Shortdesc helper)" to "Adding local short description: "foo article", overriding Wikidata description "foo" (Shortdesc helper)", which I'm fairly certain has only happened in the last 24/48 hrs? Thanks. Lugnuts Fire Walk with Me 15:12, 22 September 2019 (UTC)
noreplace
, and that ensures that the short description supplied by the template does not replace any short description earlier on the page. It's therefore quite safe to add good descriptions manually because they take precedence over anything from the infobox. You can check what is stored in the database by looking at the page info for an article – there's a link in the tools sidemenu. For example. the
page info for Chubut Province shows the 'Local description' as "Province of Argentina", the same the 'Central description' (which is what it calls the description taken from Wikidata). --
RexxS (
talk)
13:49, 26 September 2019 (UTC)We could use a little expert help at this discussion. I expect that neither of us really understands what is happening. Thanks. – Jonesey95 ( talk) 20:25, 30 October 2019 (UTC)
<div class="shortdescription nomobile noexcerpt noprint searchaux" style="display:none">Short description from top of page</div>
<div class="shortdescription nomobile noexcerpt noprint searchaux" style="display:none">Short description from infobox</div>
<div class="shortdescription nomobile noexcerpt noprint searchaux" style="display:none">Short description from middle of page</div>
<div class="shortdescription nomobile noexcerpt noprint searchaux" style="display:none">Short description from bottom of page</div>
This paragraph on Template:Short description is confusing:
The short description should concisely state what the article is about, not be a list of what it is not about, nor a list of what the reader might be looking for. Keep it short and simple. Avoid specialist terminology. As much detail as is necessary should be provided, no more—avoid listing examples. It will be displayed on mobile view along with other possible hits, and must be intelligible to the lay reader. Content of the short description should be considered part of the article content and should be managed in the same way as any other content.
On the other hand, Wikipedia:Short description#Content is fluent and illuminating. If it were me, I would delete the above paragraph and use portions of the Content section to replace it. For example, I would pare it down to the essential points:
To be clear, I am suggesting that the above bullet points replace the confusing paragraph on Template:Short description. I am not suggesting a change to Wikipedia:Short description#Content.
I'm not involved with Templates at all so I am hesitant to make any changes myself. - Mark D Worthen PsyD (talk) (I am a man. The traditional male pronouns are fine.) 21:16, 10 December 2019 (UTC)
The parameter |bot=
is used
543 times in transclusions of this template. If it is a valid parameter, it should be added to the template documentation and to the unknown parameter check that I have just added to the template. See also
Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/PearBOT 5. –
Jonesey95 (
talk)
15:12, 16 December 2019 (UTC)
@ Trialpears: Your edit here added a non-existent category "Project pages with long short description". Can you fix this? Rgrds. -- Bison X ( talk) 05:43, 18 December 2019 (UTC)
Is there a valid reason to have a short description in a template without the "noreplace" option? The reason I ask is because of
this discussion: a transcluded template with a short description was overriding articles' short descriptions. Sure, "noreplace" or <noinclude>...</noinclude>
tags can be used, but editors will continue to make this innocent error and inadvertently override articles' short descriptions.
If articles should always be allowed to override templates' short descriptions, we can probably do a namespace test and add "noreplace" automatically in Template space. – Jonesey95 ( talk) 15:27, 18 December 2019 (UTC)
<noinclude>...</noinclude>
tags.<noinclude>...</noinclude>
tags, or moved to a /doc subpage. --
RexxS (
talk)
17:23, 19 December 2019 (UTC)
"some templates (often infoboxes) have been coded to generate a short description for the article where they are transcluded". To repeat: as far as I can see, they all should have the "noreplace" parameter in order to allow an editor to add a more specific short description to a particular article. If you examine Template:Fungus common name, I would say that it should say
| text = {{short description|index of fungi with the same common name|noreplace}}This page ...
. Wouldn't you agree? --
RexxS (
talk)
01:50, 20 December 2019 (UTC)
![]() | This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | ← | Archive 3 | Archive 4 | Archive 5 | Archive 6 | Archive 7 | → | Archive 10 |
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)
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)
: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)
''''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.We do not make any capitalization changes for short descriptions; they are used exactly as they are provided. Here's an experiment you can try:
novel by Herman Melville
.eBay founder, American entrepreneur and philanthropist
.Pierre O
.Novel..
and EBay...
). If you use the Wikipedia App, you can follow the link to Pierre Omidyar's article, where the subtitle begins EBay founder...
. Somebody is capitalising short descriptions, although I haven't tried following the flow to determine where that happens. My advice would be to recommend always writing Wikidata descriptions as if they were sentence fragments, i.e use an initial capital unless you have a stylised exception like "eBay" or "iPhone", etc. But that's really above my pay grade, and I can't face the argument of telling all of the Wikidatans that they've got it wrong all this time. Cheers --
RexxS (
talk)
11:32, 7 July 2019 (UTC)
Is there any prior
RfC or discussion that establishes the "target of 40 characters"
recommendation here? I noticed that both the
Android and iOS Wikipedia apps
impose a limit of 90 characters. (However, the apps only show the option to edit the short description, which they call the "title description"
, when the short description is sourced from
Wikidata, i.e. the {{
Short description}} template is not used.) —
Newslinger
talk 08:03, 11 July 2019 (UTC) Edited to correct information on the iOS app. —
Newslinger
talk
10:11, 11 July 2019 (UTC)
"Disambiguation page providing links to topics that could be referred to by the same search term", which is shown in its entirety. Are you using the latest version of the Wikipedia app, or is it different on iOS? — Newslinger talk 10:28, 11 July 2019 (UTC)
Hi all. BrownHairedGirl, changed the verbiage on where the SD should be placed, stating MOS:ORDER, which is absolutely correct. However, it was placed there with this edit, after a very brief (3 day) discussion, see [[Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Layout#Where to put {{short description}}]]. Subsequent entries on that discussion include a reversal of one editor's opinion regarding this matter. I'm not sure if we should do an RFC, but I do think that we should come to an agreement on its placement. I understand the argument from an AWB perspective, but this causes issues because Shortdesc helper puts in on the first line. While this was brought up by Kvng during the discussion, I don't think it was sufficiently addressed in the brief discussion prior to the change being made on the actual MOS:ORDER page. Onel5969 TT me 23:56, 14 July 2019 (UTC)
Can we delete the last bullet point under
Content, which says "Use sentence case for short descriptions"? This is supposed to be an information page which "describes the editing community's established practice". Sentence case is absolutely not established practice; I have edited hundreds of descriptions using the gadget on desktop, and I've hardly ever seen sentence case used. Maybe that was the intention at the start, but the rule is virtually never applied in practice.
MichaelMaggs (
talk)
20:40, 26 July 2019 (UTC)
Fragment can be reliably converted to sentence case by rote by capitalizing the first word if not already capitalizedunfortunately is not the case either - there are exceptions such as those identified by RexxS above. Nikkimaria ( talk) 18:43, 27 July 2019 (UTC)
Note that the subtitle begins with a capital. There is no short description template in the article, therefore it gets that subtitle from the description on Wikidata at Lippendorf Power Station (Q462730), which is actually "lignite-fired power station". Obviously the software has transformed the lower-case description into the sentence-case subtitle. If we addedLippendorf Power Station
Lignite-fired power station
{{
short description|Lignite-fired power station}}
to the article, there would be no need for the software to do any transforms.Note that the software has incorrectly capitalised "eBay".Pierre Omidyar
EBay founder, American entrepreneur and philanthropist
I've encountered many long "short descriptions". Most of these involve correctly defining the subject. Examples:
Belief that Earth and its lifeforms were created in their present forms by supernatural acts of a deity between approximately 6,000 and 10,000 years ago
Belief that Earth was supernaturally created just a few thousand years ago
77 Jews on a civilian convoy to the Mount Scopus enclave, including medical personnel, slaughtered by Muslim Arabs living in Sheikh Jarrah in Jerusalem against the indifference of the British forces during the inter-communal stage of the 1948 War
Arab attack on convoy bringing supplies and personal bound for Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem during 1948 War
1917–1946 ground and air warfare branch of the Soviet Union's military
Soviet army and air force from 1917–1946
When changing these, I found it helpful to focus on a short description that distinguishes the subject from other possible similar-named subjects, rather than one that defines the subject. I believe what I'm doing is in agreement with the template page guidelines, but that's not obvious. In fact, my edits may not go far enough in this (feel free to improve them, of course). So I'm asking:
Should we specifically state that a short description should focus on distinguishing the subject, rather than defining it?
And should we have few examples demonstrating this? -- A D Monroe III( talk) 17:29, 31 July 2019 (UTC)
As a first step towards this, I've [ https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Wikipedia:Short_description&diff=909338046&oldid=906254171 added] a bullet point to this effect:
* The short description should focus on distinguishing the subject from similar ones rather than precisely defining it.
This is still rather meekly stated, and examples are still TBD. -- A D Monroe III( talk) 19:41, 4 August 2019 (UTC)
An IP is busily adding the same short description to hundreds of list articles. They are all {{short description|Wikimedia list article}} which doesn't seem very helpful but I'm not a regular user of this template myself. Kerry ( talk) 01:31, 15 August 2019 (UTC)
I created
Category:Articles with long short description, for articles with short descriptions > 80 characters. Pages could be suppressed from this category by using long=yes
in the short description.
Unfortunately, this includes disambiguation pages, even when they override the default long short description with a short short description so I have reverted my changes to the template for now.
All the best:
Rich
Farmbrough,
22:30, 31 August 2019 (UTC).
In the Content section is this statement: Use sentence case for short descriptions. It is technically problematic to have to convert case when there may be proper nouns in the text.
The second sentence perplexed me. "Is it saying I should not capitalize proper nouns?" It was only until I read through this Talk page that I was able to answer that question in the negative, i.e., use sentence case, which requires capitalizing proper nouns.
To prevent flummoxing other editors, I suggest eliminating the second sentence. Guidance should be clear and direct. Explanations for the guidance are not necessary.
I did not edit the statement myself because I am new to this topic. Thanks! - Mark D Worthen PsyD (talk) (I am a man. The traditional male pronouns are fine.) 19:33, 2 September 2019 (UTC)
I've added {{Short description|none}} to several articles which have sufficiently clear titles:
Albert King discography,
Ball and Chain (Big Mama Thornton song),
Bring It On Home (Sonny Boy Williamson II song),
Come On (Earl King song),
Double Trouble (Otis Rush song),
Early in the Mornin' (Louis Jordan song),
Elmore James discography, etc. However, they continue to show a Wikidata description. Is there some other way to do this? —
Ojorojo (
talk)
16:15, 21 September 2019 (UTC)
{{u|
Mark viking}} {
Talk}
18:46, 21 September 2019 (UTC)
{{
Short description|none}}
doesn't provide a short description (obviously), so a value is fetched from Wikidata. if there was an easy way of simply turning off the Wikidata, we would have done that instead of having to supply 2,000,000 short descriptions. --
RexxS (
talk)
19:18, 21 September 2019 (UTC)
{{
Short description|none}}
may be used. However, this will not override the descriptions from Wikidata." — Ojorojo ( talk) 20:13, 21 September 2019 (UTC)
I just added {{
Short description|none}}
to an article that had no template before, and it shows up as "none". Have now replaced this with
.
Mathglot (
talk)
20:19, 14 October 2019 (UTC)
Hi, just wanted to inform you all of my intention to add a bot parameter to the template for the purposes of my bot task adding automatic short descriptions to biography articles. The plan is to categorize them additionally in hidden Category:Articles with short descrption added by {{{bot}}}. Feel free to give feedback! ‑‑ Trialpears ( talk) 21:35, 12 November 2019 (UTC)
|bot=PearBOT 5
if wanted (to indicate that the description has been checked)? Is that should remove?
Johnuniq (
talk)
22:42, 12 November 2019 (UTC)
Has anyone else seen the short description displayed twice on some pages, despite there only being one SD? I've seen this a fair bit today, and I don't recall seeing it before. Could it be linked to the update that has changed the edit summary from "Adding local short description: "foo artcile" (Shortdesc helper)" to "Adding local short description: "foo article", overriding Wikidata description "foo" (Shortdesc helper)", which I'm fairly certain has only happened in the last 24/48 hrs? Thanks. Lugnuts Fire Walk with Me 15:12, 22 September 2019 (UTC)
noreplace
, and that ensures that the short description supplied by the template does not replace any short description earlier on the page. It's therefore quite safe to add good descriptions manually because they take precedence over anything from the infobox. You can check what is stored in the database by looking at the page info for an article – there's a link in the tools sidemenu. For example. the
page info for Chubut Province shows the 'Local description' as "Province of Argentina", the same the 'Central description' (which is what it calls the description taken from Wikidata). --
RexxS (
talk)
13:49, 26 September 2019 (UTC)We could use a little expert help at this discussion. I expect that neither of us really understands what is happening. Thanks. – Jonesey95 ( talk) 20:25, 30 October 2019 (UTC)
<div class="shortdescription nomobile noexcerpt noprint searchaux" style="display:none">Short description from top of page</div>
<div class="shortdescription nomobile noexcerpt noprint searchaux" style="display:none">Short description from infobox</div>
<div class="shortdescription nomobile noexcerpt noprint searchaux" style="display:none">Short description from middle of page</div>
<div class="shortdescription nomobile noexcerpt noprint searchaux" style="display:none">Short description from bottom of page</div>
This paragraph on Template:Short description is confusing:
The short description should concisely state what the article is about, not be a list of what it is not about, nor a list of what the reader might be looking for. Keep it short and simple. Avoid specialist terminology. As much detail as is necessary should be provided, no more—avoid listing examples. It will be displayed on mobile view along with other possible hits, and must be intelligible to the lay reader. Content of the short description should be considered part of the article content and should be managed in the same way as any other content.
On the other hand, Wikipedia:Short description#Content is fluent and illuminating. If it were me, I would delete the above paragraph and use portions of the Content section to replace it. For example, I would pare it down to the essential points:
To be clear, I am suggesting that the above bullet points replace the confusing paragraph on Template:Short description. I am not suggesting a change to Wikipedia:Short description#Content.
I'm not involved with Templates at all so I am hesitant to make any changes myself. - Mark D Worthen PsyD (talk) (I am a man. The traditional male pronouns are fine.) 21:16, 10 December 2019 (UTC)
The parameter |bot=
is used
543 times in transclusions of this template. If it is a valid parameter, it should be added to the template documentation and to the unknown parameter check that I have just added to the template. See also
Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/PearBOT 5. –
Jonesey95 (
talk)
15:12, 16 December 2019 (UTC)
@ Trialpears: Your edit here added a non-existent category "Project pages with long short description". Can you fix this? Rgrds. -- Bison X ( talk) 05:43, 18 December 2019 (UTC)
Is there a valid reason to have a short description in a template without the "noreplace" option? The reason I ask is because of
this discussion: a transcluded template with a short description was overriding articles' short descriptions. Sure, "noreplace" or <noinclude>...</noinclude>
tags can be used, but editors will continue to make this innocent error and inadvertently override articles' short descriptions.
If articles should always be allowed to override templates' short descriptions, we can probably do a namespace test and add "noreplace" automatically in Template space. – Jonesey95 ( talk) 15:27, 18 December 2019 (UTC)
<noinclude>...</noinclude>
tags.<noinclude>...</noinclude>
tags, or moved to a /doc subpage. --
RexxS (
talk)
17:23, 19 December 2019 (UTC)
"some templates (often infoboxes) have been coded to generate a short description for the article where they are transcluded". To repeat: as far as I can see, they all should have the "noreplace" parameter in order to allow an editor to add a more specific short description to a particular article. If you examine Template:Fungus common name, I would say that it should say
| text = {{short description|index of fungi with the same common name|noreplace}}This page ...
. Wouldn't you agree? --
RexxS (
talk)
01:50, 20 December 2019 (UTC)