![]() | 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 5 | Archive 6 | Archive 7 | Archive 8 | Archive 9 | Archive 10 |
I usually add birth/death dates to SDs on biographies, if there is nothing else that seems significant and the SD is otherwise very short - e.g. "French author (born 1949)". And I frequently see dates in other SDs. For the first time (to my knowledge), I was reverted here with the edit description "DOB is unnecessary for short description". Any comments? MB 16:04, 19 April 2020 (UTC)
I didn’t see any awareness of other uses of short description in this article. Should they be documented? Might they influence which pages have a short description? Or, are these other uses incorrect in intention, perhaps? —¿philoserf? ( talk) 17:02, 1 May 2020 (UTC)
I have now added or edited a lot of short descriptions in mathematics. Some specific problems appear. One of them is that it is often very difficult to provide a useful short description in less than 40 characters. Less than 80 is generally possible, but this generally needs a high expertise of the subject. Nevertheless, input from non-mathematicians can be useful on some aspects.
The questions that I have asked for are relatively minor, as they do not prevent me to go ahead. However it should be useful to adapt the project page to make it compatible with domain specificities, or at least to make clearer which adaptations are allowed in specific domains. D.Lazard ( talk) 17:45, 29 April 2020 (UTC)
To make SDs more useful I'd like to see a toggle-able option to display short descriptions in category listing. This would be especially useful for topics where article title reveal little about their subject. Some examples include mathematical theorems named after a person (as discussed above), standards titled by their standard number (e.g. Category:IEEE standards) and military articles about units and equipment. A button to turn this feature on and off would not add much clutter, and might be limited to categories where it makes the most sense.-- agr ( talk) 18:33, 3 May 2020 (UTC)
I see that a huge number of lists have recently been updated to carry the short description "Wikipedia list article". Even Lists of women carries it. Is it standard policy to add the same description to all lists? If so, what does such a description add to an understanding of the contents? Would more explicit descriptions not be preferable, e.g. in this case: "Subject-based index of all Wikipedia lists about women". I can understand some of the arguments about the need to have a short description included in every mainspace article but I am not convinced such systematic standardization is useful.-- Ipigott ( talk) 11:26, 14 March 2020 (UTC)
I asked you to please stop those, if you want to interpret this as a "demand", that's really up to you, but those words are synonymous. As for WP:MEATBOT, see WP:BOTDICT#Meatbot. If you felt insulted, then I apologize for that, since no insult was intended. I don't doubt that you made those edits in good faith, but they did not/do not have consensus, and plowing ahead with mass edits in the face of opposition is grounds for a block. Headbomb { t · c · p · b} 04:20, 23 March 2020 (UTC)
I understand that editors will have different takes on what short descriptions should be, but perhaps a simplified outline of our options would help each of use see the other's view?
At present we have two options:
There is no option to have no short description at present. However, when 2,000,000 articles have short descriptions, the WMF team responsible for implementing short descriptions has promised to turn off fetching the description from Wikidata. That will then allow us to have articles with no short description.
Most articles benefit from a short description. For example, if someone looking for a benzopyrene compound that causes cancer from smoking, starts typing Benzopyrene in the mobile site search box, the first three hits they might get are:
The mobile user can see that the third suggested result is the article they want.
However, if they were looking for a list of Irish women artists, they will find List of Irish women artists once they type list of Irish w, no matter what the short description is. For many list articles, the title does the job of the short description, so we don't need one. Unfortunately, we can't have that option until we've added short descriptions to 2,000,000 articles. In the meantime, it makes sense to add short descriptions where we can, as it brings us closer to our goal of switching off the fetch from Wikidata. For that reason, I would ask Headbomb not to remove short descriptions such as "Wikipedia list article" from articles like List of scientific publications by Albert Einstein, please, because the software just will pull the description from Wikidata (ironically "Wikimedia list article" at present), and that is one less toward our target.
Does it matter what we use as a short description for these list articles? Not much, because they are not going to be used for anything. Nobody needs to be told that List of Irish women artists is about Irish women artists, or that it's a list article. But for now, we have to have something, and I recommend "Wikipedia list article" because it will be easy to remove as redundant by bot when we gain the option to have no short description. Hasten the day. -- RexxS ( talk) 00:11, 23 March 2020 (UTC)
{{Short description}}
instead o {{Short description|Wikipedia list article}}
, so that maintenance across thousands of articles can be done at once, usage tracked, and so that people who are looking to actually provide a useful short description don't have to remove "Wikipedia list article".
Headbomb {
t ·
c ·
p ·
b}
17:52, 23 March 2020 (UTC)
→{{short description|none}}←
gives →←. However, that doesn't help, as was already explained."Once Wikipedia editors write ~2 million descriptions, we'll switch to entirely Wikipedia-hosted descriptions".
"people who are looking to actually provide a useful short description don't have to remove "Wikipedia list article"as they will still have to add their version to the template or use the 'Short decscription helper'. Deleting three words at that point is hardly an extra imposition. -- RexxS ( talk) 18:44, 23 March 2020 (UTC)
"{{ Short description}} can be updated to invoke an empty string"for the 233rd time. I know it can. I wrote the code to do it. But it doesn't result in an empty short description, so what's the point of you raising the issue?
{{SHORTDESC:}}
magic word, and the 'Central description' field from the Wikidata description field. The template clearly can't "import the short description of a different Q object, one that is purposefully blank, or non-existent."
{{SHORTDESC:}}
magic word to "import" some other short description, try convincing the WMF team at
phab:T184000 to implement your suggestion. Good luck with that. "The 'Local description' field is populated from the {{SHORTDESC:}}
magic word, and the 'Central description' field from the Wikidata description field." Highlighting the relevant part. For
list of particles, the Wikidata item is
Wikidata:Q783766. The short description is "Wikimedia list article". There is no reason why {{
short description}} cannot be made to fetch a different item's short description (e.g.
Wikidata:Q#####) which is purposefully empty/blank, when specific conditions are met (such as a title beggining with
List of...). And if that's not a possibility, for whatever reason, we can still provided a default string for lists in lieu of importing the Wikidata description.
Headbomb {
t ·
c ·
p ·
b}
22:17, 23 March 2020 (UTC)
"There is no reason why {{ short description}} cannot be made to fetch a different item's short description ..."is simply untrue. There is a very practical reason: the WMF team won't allow it. End of story. You can't just change the way MediaWiki software works without agreement, and the Reading Team won't accept anything that circumvents having a short description until we have written 2,000,000 local descriptions. I truly wish it wasn't so, but this entire sorry story is littered with examples of the Reading Team deciding that they know best, and ignoring input from the volunteer community.
Under content we are advised both to "focus on distinguishing the subject from similar ones" and that "Duplication of information already in the title is to be avoided". These directives are, in many cases, completely contradictory. As an illustration, someone added to List of fishes of Missouri, "Wikipedia list article", which fails the first directive. My inclination would be to use something more descriptive like "List of Missouri fishes", which fails the second directive. Which directive should take precedence? WolfmanSF ( talk) 23:51, 16 March 2020 (UTC)
This AN thread is relevant to the above discussion. LEPRICAVARK ( talk) 23:10, 22 March 2020 (UTC)
"Wikipedia list article" in no way disambiguate the topic. If topic is a list of cyclists, the topic isn't "Wikipedia list article". A person seeing
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/ > wiki
List of cyclists - Wikipedia
This is an incomplete list of professional racing cyclists, sorted alphabetically by decade in which they won their first major race. This transport-related...
Would know that the link is about a list on Wikipedia (and one concerning cyclists). This is not something that needs disambiguation, unlike the various James Adams, which do. Headbomb { t · c · p · b} 09:44, 23 March 2020 (UTC)
Note: The AN thread is archived here. 207.161.86.162 ( talk) 06:56, 4 May 2020 (UTC)
I just found this because I was trying to figure out any explanation for this entirely useless descriptor we have, and found that it is attached to 56,794 articles at present. I just looked at the AN thread and I don't see that there's an actual resolution to this issue that has metastasized across wikipedia. I don't think the idea that we need to have a certain number of short descriptions to stop wikidata is an acceptable reason for this. Natureium ( talk) 18:33, 8 May 2020 (UTC)
You are invited to join the discussion at
Wikipedia:Village pump (WMF)/Archive 1#Update: Scheduled shutdown of Wikidata descriptions on EnWiki.
* Pppery *
it has begun...
14:32, 15 May 2020 (UTC)
At COVID-19 pandemic, the short description recently changed to "Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on environmental issues", even though the short description wikitext was not changed. I suspect it may have something to do with the fact that the environmental issues article is excerpted into the main article, but the excerpt text was not recently changed, either. Can you please roll back any change you might have recently made, and can we figure out what's going on here? {{u| Sdkb}} talk 21:31, 14 May 2020 (UTC)
|2=noreplace
to the short description template so that when the lead is transcluded, it does not change the short description in the target article (the last short description that appears in the article is the one that is rendered). This option is normally used for templates, since articles and article sections are not normally transcluded. –
Jonesey95 (
talk)
22:40, 14 May 2020 (UTC)There does not seem to be any use of the |pagetype=
parameter. Should it be removed or should there be a push to make use of it? —
Ghost in the machine
talk to me
16:05, 22 May 2020 (UTC)
{{{2}}}
{{{Pagetype}}}
and how it is used (only in templates?) — GhostInTheMachine talk to me 18:37, 6 June 2020 (UTC)
This breaks when used on a category as at Category:CS1 maint: archived copy as title where it creates the ugly Category:Categorys with short description - it needs to be a bit more sophisticated to be able to spell categories when in category space. And per WP:REDNOT it should be detecting the attempt to use a non-existent category and not insert it (but instead trigger a tracking category), by the look of the Category:Categorys with short description this is not the first time. Le Deluge ( talk) 19:26, 24 May 2020 (UTC)
{{pagetype/sandbox}}
→ page{{pagetype/sandbox |plural=y}}
→ pages{{pagetype/sandbox |plural=n |page=Category:CS1 maint: archived copy as title}}
→ category{{pagetype/sandbox |plural=y |page=Category:CS1 maint: archived copy as title}}
→ categories![]() | This
edit request to
Template:Short description has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request. |
Currently, the template puts categories in Category:Categorys with short description. However, it should be Category:Categories with short description. Can someone fix that? Crazy Boy 826 18:52, 8 June 2020 (UTC)
I see that many articles such as
London and
Paris have two short descriptions: one from {{
short description}} and one from {{
Infobox settlement}}. There may be as many as half a million cases. This can be fixed by removing {{short description}}
after transferring its text to {{Infobox settlement}}
's |short_description=
if it is an improvement. Is this something we would want to fix by allowing one description to override the other, or by transferring the text to a parameter with a bot, either now or once Wikidata is out of the picture?
Certes (
talk)
15:17, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
noreplace
parameter). Short description templates have precedence over properly-coded infoboxes that set noreplace. There's no need for any transfers. --
RexxS (
talk)
16:07, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
div class="shortdescription...Capital city in England
and div class="shortdescription...Capital of the United Kingdom
, though of course they're set to display:none
. It seems that search handles this well and ignores the superfluous "England" description generated by the infobox.
Certes (
talk)
16:37, 10 June 2020 (UTC)What's the point of generically defining disambiguation in the {{ disambiguation}}? It doesn't describe the disambiguation page any more than "Wikipedia article about the titular topic" describes every Wikipedia article. Similarly, redirects don't need description (exception for R with possibilities, if the description describes that potential topic). I also see a lot of mainspace list articles with a useless "description" of "Wikipedia list article", which should also be omitted, but at least they don't appear to be shoehorned in by templates. -- JHunterJ ( talk) 20:24, 9 June 2020 (UTC)
Category:Disambiguation page with short description is to be renamed to Category:Disambiguation pages with short descriptions following a CFD discussion but it is not at all clear what needs changing to move the thousands of pages over. What is generating this category? Timrollpickering ( talk) 15:56, 14 June 2020 (UTC)
2.4 million transclusions is well beyond what I'd consider it appropriate to apply full protection for high-risk templates, but given that {{ Short description}} has been recently edited by a number of template editors, I think maybe it's worth discussing first. cc recent editors ( Trialpears, DannyS712, Jonesey95, and Gonnym) as well as Primefac and Galobtter. I'm open to being wrong, but it's a massive public-facing template that will only grow, so I think it's inevitable if not overdue. ~ Amory ( u • t • c) 00:10, 9 July 2020 (UTC)
Hi, this is just a heads-up that the Wikipedia app is working on paying more attention to English Wikipedia's short descriptions from an editing perspective. You can read more in phab:T257488.
(While I'd normally follow up here and reply to pings and so on if there are any questions, I'll be out of office for a while, so asking in Phabricator will probably be a safer way to get replies. If you're uncomfortable doing so, leave a note on my talk page and I'll get back to you later, but be aware it might take a while.) / Johan (WMF) ( talk) 18:08, 14 July 2020 (UTC)
I wrote this over at the bot RFC, but I wanted to suggest it as a standalone item here. This is an idea for a report-assisted import tool for short descriptions. Here's the functional description; I have no idea how it would be programmed.
I have populated a few thousand short descriptions, and some categories of articles appear to be pretty consistent in their quality. Sportspeople of various types tend to have reliable short descriptions. A human could identify a parent category on Wikipedia like Category:Association football players, or dig down into a subcategory like Category:English footballers (22,000 articles). Within those categories, exclude articles that already have a short description, then run a report that shows a list that includes the article name, maybe the lead sentence, and the Wikidata description for each article.
A human could look at a report on 100 or 1,000 articles at a time, manually eliminate pages with bad Wikidata descriptions, and do a batch import of the rest (the eliminated pages could be picked up on a second round; the idea for now is to bring in lots of good short descriptions quickly). It wouldn't be an automated bot process, but I think that once you got the system set up, it would be quick for a detail-oriented editor to process many thousands of articles per hour.
We could ask on this project page for likely categories. In footballers alone, you could probably add 100,000+ short descriptions in a couple of days. The same process could be used for species, books, movies, video games, and other items where the Wikidata bot that created descriptions had an easy time processing the lead sentence (or whatever information it used). – Jonesey95 ( talk) 16:11, 7 August 2020 (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 5 | Archive 6 | Archive 7 | Archive 8 | Archive 9 | Archive 10 |
I usually add birth/death dates to SDs on biographies, if there is nothing else that seems significant and the SD is otherwise very short - e.g. "French author (born 1949)". And I frequently see dates in other SDs. For the first time (to my knowledge), I was reverted here with the edit description "DOB is unnecessary for short description". Any comments? MB 16:04, 19 April 2020 (UTC)
I didn’t see any awareness of other uses of short description in this article. Should they be documented? Might they influence which pages have a short description? Or, are these other uses incorrect in intention, perhaps? —¿philoserf? ( talk) 17:02, 1 May 2020 (UTC)
I have now added or edited a lot of short descriptions in mathematics. Some specific problems appear. One of them is that it is often very difficult to provide a useful short description in less than 40 characters. Less than 80 is generally possible, but this generally needs a high expertise of the subject. Nevertheless, input from non-mathematicians can be useful on some aspects.
The questions that I have asked for are relatively minor, as they do not prevent me to go ahead. However it should be useful to adapt the project page to make it compatible with domain specificities, or at least to make clearer which adaptations are allowed in specific domains. D.Lazard ( talk) 17:45, 29 April 2020 (UTC)
To make SDs more useful I'd like to see a toggle-able option to display short descriptions in category listing. This would be especially useful for topics where article title reveal little about their subject. Some examples include mathematical theorems named after a person (as discussed above), standards titled by their standard number (e.g. Category:IEEE standards) and military articles about units and equipment. A button to turn this feature on and off would not add much clutter, and might be limited to categories where it makes the most sense.-- agr ( talk) 18:33, 3 May 2020 (UTC)
I see that a huge number of lists have recently been updated to carry the short description "Wikipedia list article". Even Lists of women carries it. Is it standard policy to add the same description to all lists? If so, what does such a description add to an understanding of the contents? Would more explicit descriptions not be preferable, e.g. in this case: "Subject-based index of all Wikipedia lists about women". I can understand some of the arguments about the need to have a short description included in every mainspace article but I am not convinced such systematic standardization is useful.-- Ipigott ( talk) 11:26, 14 March 2020 (UTC)
I asked you to please stop those, if you want to interpret this as a "demand", that's really up to you, but those words are synonymous. As for WP:MEATBOT, see WP:BOTDICT#Meatbot. If you felt insulted, then I apologize for that, since no insult was intended. I don't doubt that you made those edits in good faith, but they did not/do not have consensus, and plowing ahead with mass edits in the face of opposition is grounds for a block. Headbomb { t · c · p · b} 04:20, 23 March 2020 (UTC)
I understand that editors will have different takes on what short descriptions should be, but perhaps a simplified outline of our options would help each of use see the other's view?
At present we have two options:
There is no option to have no short description at present. However, when 2,000,000 articles have short descriptions, the WMF team responsible for implementing short descriptions has promised to turn off fetching the description from Wikidata. That will then allow us to have articles with no short description.
Most articles benefit from a short description. For example, if someone looking for a benzopyrene compound that causes cancer from smoking, starts typing Benzopyrene in the mobile site search box, the first three hits they might get are:
The mobile user can see that the third suggested result is the article they want.
However, if they were looking for a list of Irish women artists, they will find List of Irish women artists once they type list of Irish w, no matter what the short description is. For many list articles, the title does the job of the short description, so we don't need one. Unfortunately, we can't have that option until we've added short descriptions to 2,000,000 articles. In the meantime, it makes sense to add short descriptions where we can, as it brings us closer to our goal of switching off the fetch from Wikidata. For that reason, I would ask Headbomb not to remove short descriptions such as "Wikipedia list article" from articles like List of scientific publications by Albert Einstein, please, because the software just will pull the description from Wikidata (ironically "Wikimedia list article" at present), and that is one less toward our target.
Does it matter what we use as a short description for these list articles? Not much, because they are not going to be used for anything. Nobody needs to be told that List of Irish women artists is about Irish women artists, or that it's a list article. But for now, we have to have something, and I recommend "Wikipedia list article" because it will be easy to remove as redundant by bot when we gain the option to have no short description. Hasten the day. -- RexxS ( talk) 00:11, 23 March 2020 (UTC)
{{Short description}}
instead o {{Short description|Wikipedia list article}}
, so that maintenance across thousands of articles can be done at once, usage tracked, and so that people who are looking to actually provide a useful short description don't have to remove "Wikipedia list article".
Headbomb {
t ·
c ·
p ·
b}
17:52, 23 March 2020 (UTC)
→{{short description|none}}←
gives →←. However, that doesn't help, as was already explained."Once Wikipedia editors write ~2 million descriptions, we'll switch to entirely Wikipedia-hosted descriptions".
"people who are looking to actually provide a useful short description don't have to remove "Wikipedia list article"as they will still have to add their version to the template or use the 'Short decscription helper'. Deleting three words at that point is hardly an extra imposition. -- RexxS ( talk) 18:44, 23 March 2020 (UTC)
"{{ Short description}} can be updated to invoke an empty string"for the 233rd time. I know it can. I wrote the code to do it. But it doesn't result in an empty short description, so what's the point of you raising the issue?
{{SHORTDESC:}}
magic word, and the 'Central description' field from the Wikidata description field. The template clearly can't "import the short description of a different Q object, one that is purposefully blank, or non-existent."
{{SHORTDESC:}}
magic word to "import" some other short description, try convincing the WMF team at
phab:T184000 to implement your suggestion. Good luck with that. "The 'Local description' field is populated from the {{SHORTDESC:}}
magic word, and the 'Central description' field from the Wikidata description field." Highlighting the relevant part. For
list of particles, the Wikidata item is
Wikidata:Q783766. The short description is "Wikimedia list article". There is no reason why {{
short description}} cannot be made to fetch a different item's short description (e.g.
Wikidata:Q#####) which is purposefully empty/blank, when specific conditions are met (such as a title beggining with
List of...). And if that's not a possibility, for whatever reason, we can still provided a default string for lists in lieu of importing the Wikidata description.
Headbomb {
t ·
c ·
p ·
b}
22:17, 23 March 2020 (UTC)
"There is no reason why {{ short description}} cannot be made to fetch a different item's short description ..."is simply untrue. There is a very practical reason: the WMF team won't allow it. End of story. You can't just change the way MediaWiki software works without agreement, and the Reading Team won't accept anything that circumvents having a short description until we have written 2,000,000 local descriptions. I truly wish it wasn't so, but this entire sorry story is littered with examples of the Reading Team deciding that they know best, and ignoring input from the volunteer community.
Under content we are advised both to "focus on distinguishing the subject from similar ones" and that "Duplication of information already in the title is to be avoided". These directives are, in many cases, completely contradictory. As an illustration, someone added to List of fishes of Missouri, "Wikipedia list article", which fails the first directive. My inclination would be to use something more descriptive like "List of Missouri fishes", which fails the second directive. Which directive should take precedence? WolfmanSF ( talk) 23:51, 16 March 2020 (UTC)
This AN thread is relevant to the above discussion. LEPRICAVARK ( talk) 23:10, 22 March 2020 (UTC)
"Wikipedia list article" in no way disambiguate the topic. If topic is a list of cyclists, the topic isn't "Wikipedia list article". A person seeing
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/ > wiki
List of cyclists - Wikipedia
This is an incomplete list of professional racing cyclists, sorted alphabetically by decade in which they won their first major race. This transport-related...
Would know that the link is about a list on Wikipedia (and one concerning cyclists). This is not something that needs disambiguation, unlike the various James Adams, which do. Headbomb { t · c · p · b} 09:44, 23 March 2020 (UTC)
Note: The AN thread is archived here. 207.161.86.162 ( talk) 06:56, 4 May 2020 (UTC)
I just found this because I was trying to figure out any explanation for this entirely useless descriptor we have, and found that it is attached to 56,794 articles at present. I just looked at the AN thread and I don't see that there's an actual resolution to this issue that has metastasized across wikipedia. I don't think the idea that we need to have a certain number of short descriptions to stop wikidata is an acceptable reason for this. Natureium ( talk) 18:33, 8 May 2020 (UTC)
You are invited to join the discussion at
Wikipedia:Village pump (WMF)/Archive 1#Update: Scheduled shutdown of Wikidata descriptions on EnWiki.
* Pppery *
it has begun...
14:32, 15 May 2020 (UTC)
At COVID-19 pandemic, the short description recently changed to "Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on environmental issues", even though the short description wikitext was not changed. I suspect it may have something to do with the fact that the environmental issues article is excerpted into the main article, but the excerpt text was not recently changed, either. Can you please roll back any change you might have recently made, and can we figure out what's going on here? {{u| Sdkb}} talk 21:31, 14 May 2020 (UTC)
|2=noreplace
to the short description template so that when the lead is transcluded, it does not change the short description in the target article (the last short description that appears in the article is the one that is rendered). This option is normally used for templates, since articles and article sections are not normally transcluded. –
Jonesey95 (
talk)
22:40, 14 May 2020 (UTC)There does not seem to be any use of the |pagetype=
parameter. Should it be removed or should there be a push to make use of it? —
Ghost in the machine
talk to me
16:05, 22 May 2020 (UTC)
{{{2}}}
{{{Pagetype}}}
and how it is used (only in templates?) — GhostInTheMachine talk to me 18:37, 6 June 2020 (UTC)
This breaks when used on a category as at Category:CS1 maint: archived copy as title where it creates the ugly Category:Categorys with short description - it needs to be a bit more sophisticated to be able to spell categories when in category space. And per WP:REDNOT it should be detecting the attempt to use a non-existent category and not insert it (but instead trigger a tracking category), by the look of the Category:Categorys with short description this is not the first time. Le Deluge ( talk) 19:26, 24 May 2020 (UTC)
{{pagetype/sandbox}}
→ page{{pagetype/sandbox |plural=y}}
→ pages{{pagetype/sandbox |plural=n |page=Category:CS1 maint: archived copy as title}}
→ category{{pagetype/sandbox |plural=y |page=Category:CS1 maint: archived copy as title}}
→ categories![]() | This
edit request to
Template:Short description has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request. |
Currently, the template puts categories in Category:Categorys with short description. However, it should be Category:Categories with short description. Can someone fix that? Crazy Boy 826 18:52, 8 June 2020 (UTC)
I see that many articles such as
London and
Paris have two short descriptions: one from {{
short description}} and one from {{
Infobox settlement}}. There may be as many as half a million cases. This can be fixed by removing {{short description}}
after transferring its text to {{Infobox settlement}}
's |short_description=
if it is an improvement. Is this something we would want to fix by allowing one description to override the other, or by transferring the text to a parameter with a bot, either now or once Wikidata is out of the picture?
Certes (
talk)
15:17, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
noreplace
parameter). Short description templates have precedence over properly-coded infoboxes that set noreplace. There's no need for any transfers. --
RexxS (
talk)
16:07, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
div class="shortdescription...Capital city in England
and div class="shortdescription...Capital of the United Kingdom
, though of course they're set to display:none
. It seems that search handles this well and ignores the superfluous "England" description generated by the infobox.
Certes (
talk)
16:37, 10 June 2020 (UTC)What's the point of generically defining disambiguation in the {{ disambiguation}}? It doesn't describe the disambiguation page any more than "Wikipedia article about the titular topic" describes every Wikipedia article. Similarly, redirects don't need description (exception for R with possibilities, if the description describes that potential topic). I also see a lot of mainspace list articles with a useless "description" of "Wikipedia list article", which should also be omitted, but at least they don't appear to be shoehorned in by templates. -- JHunterJ ( talk) 20:24, 9 June 2020 (UTC)
Category:Disambiguation page with short description is to be renamed to Category:Disambiguation pages with short descriptions following a CFD discussion but it is not at all clear what needs changing to move the thousands of pages over. What is generating this category? Timrollpickering ( talk) 15:56, 14 June 2020 (UTC)
2.4 million transclusions is well beyond what I'd consider it appropriate to apply full protection for high-risk templates, but given that {{ Short description}} has been recently edited by a number of template editors, I think maybe it's worth discussing first. cc recent editors ( Trialpears, DannyS712, Jonesey95, and Gonnym) as well as Primefac and Galobtter. I'm open to being wrong, but it's a massive public-facing template that will only grow, so I think it's inevitable if not overdue. ~ Amory ( u • t • c) 00:10, 9 July 2020 (UTC)
Hi, this is just a heads-up that the Wikipedia app is working on paying more attention to English Wikipedia's short descriptions from an editing perspective. You can read more in phab:T257488.
(While I'd normally follow up here and reply to pings and so on if there are any questions, I'll be out of office for a while, so asking in Phabricator will probably be a safer way to get replies. If you're uncomfortable doing so, leave a note on my talk page and I'll get back to you later, but be aware it might take a while.) / Johan (WMF) ( talk) 18:08, 14 July 2020 (UTC)
I wrote this over at the bot RFC, but I wanted to suggest it as a standalone item here. This is an idea for a report-assisted import tool for short descriptions. Here's the functional description; I have no idea how it would be programmed.
I have populated a few thousand short descriptions, and some categories of articles appear to be pretty consistent in their quality. Sportspeople of various types tend to have reliable short descriptions. A human could identify a parent category on Wikipedia like Category:Association football players, or dig down into a subcategory like Category:English footballers (22,000 articles). Within those categories, exclude articles that already have a short description, then run a report that shows a list that includes the article name, maybe the lead sentence, and the Wikidata description for each article.
A human could look at a report on 100 or 1,000 articles at a time, manually eliminate pages with bad Wikidata descriptions, and do a batch import of the rest (the eliminated pages could be picked up on a second round; the idea for now is to bring in lots of good short descriptions quickly). It wouldn't be an automated bot process, but I think that once you got the system set up, it would be quick for a detail-oriented editor to process many thousands of articles per hour.
We could ask on this project page for likely categories. In footballers alone, you could probably add 100,000+ short descriptions in a couple of days. The same process could be used for species, books, movies, video games, and other items where the Wikidata bot that created descriptions had an easy time processing the lead sentence (or whatever information it used). – Jonesey95 ( talk) 16:11, 7 August 2020 (UTC)