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(Discussion transferred from User talk:Wittylama)
Hi Wittylama, Please read the background and history of the {{ short description}} at Wikipedia:WikiProject Short descriptions, where I think you will find that the subject has had sufficient discussion for the template to be applied, and for Wikidata descriptions to be used where they are good enough. You may also take into account that this was imposed upon Wikipedia by WMF when they decided to overrule consensus not to allow the use of Wikidata short descriptions until there are at least 2 million local to Wikipedia. Since you have reverted this instance, I leave it to you to provide a better version. I do not have the time to debate each case in isolation. Please take any discussion on this matter to the project talk page and ping me if you want my attention. Cheers, · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 10:02, 9 May 2018 (UTC)
"...Wikidata descriptions will be permanently discontinued "Citation, please? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 13:52, 9 May 2018 (UTC)
In stage one of this process, if blanked the description, then it would be easy for someone to run a bot and put that on every page. I have said consistently that mass blanking of the descriptions is not going to work for us. Once there are ~2 million descriptions on English WP articles, we move to stage two, and at that point any page that doesn't have a SHORTDESC magic word will automatically be blank. This is the same thing I've said throughout the discussion.(my emphasis added) · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 15:37, 9 May 2018 (UTC)
Wittylama, This discussion should be on the project talk page, as I requested above. With your permission I will relocate it. · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 15:29, 9 May 2018 (UTC)
Hmm. If we're going to start to see edit wars over the presence or not of {{
short description}}
, it looks as if a further community discussion may be necessary before continuing with this project. Where descriptions in Wikidata are missing, inadequate, or incorrect, should we continue adding or changing descriptions locally on enwiki, or should we all pile into Wikidata and add or change them there? Where descriptions in Wikidata are adequate, should we copy them over or continue to draw them from Wikidata?
: Noyster
(talk), 09:51, 10 May 2018 (UTC)
Didn't we just have an RfC? In the village pump? Advertised on CENT? That decided we were going to have local descriptions and discontinue the use of Wikidata descriptions? And another RfC an year ago that had a consensus not to use wikidata descriptions? If someone wants to change then start a bloody RfC. If not, then allow the descriptions to be added locally. (I'll also note that there is no real centralization across wikis for these descriptions unlike other data like interwikis or numbers; the english description is only going to be written by those in english and english wikipedia and putting it here grants it visibility meaning it'll get maintained and not vandalized; there is no more effort doing descriptions here than on wikidata; in fact it is easier to do things here because we can generate consistent descriptions en masse from infoboxes) Galobtter ( pingó mió) 13:07, 10 May 2018 (UTC)
I'm as puzzled as Wittylama by all the spam produced by pointless edits which merely replicate Wikidata's descriptions, thereby increasing Wikipedia's technical debt. I hope someone has an exit plan, in case the community ever changes mind on allowing such redundancy, including a bot able to remove all duplicate descriptions and update Wikidata's descriptions with the local ones which were actually supposed to update the Wikidata description. Nemo 15:25, 21 July 2019 (UTC)
A Bot Request was made by User:Bhunacat10
Do you think this is a good idea?
Convert this:
{{SHORTDESC:<xyz>}}
..to this:
{{Short description|<xyz>}}
The rationale from #Which articles have a short description on Wikipedia?:
... about 400 are using the SHORTDESC magic word. These should be converted to the standard {{ Short description}} template for ease of maintenance.
Do you think this is a good idea to have a background process continually checking for and converting these? Bot writers are required to verify there is consensus. -- Green C 14:17, 13 January 2019 (UTC)
Could the bot move short descriptions from odd places in the text to the top (or within a few lines of the top) at the same time? · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 10:51, 15 January 2019 (UTC)
{{SHORTDESC:<xyz>}}
descriptions :); also moving to the top would be good as Pbsouthwood said.
Galobtter (
pingó mió) 13:41, 17 January 2019 (UTC){{SHORTDESC:<xyz>}}
since that is what it searches for (only a few hundred). Better solution would be a task that checks all instances of {{Short description|<xyz>}}
for moving. --
Green
C 14:57, 17 January 2019 (UTC)
update: After 1 week, the script ran automatically on schedule and converted 6 cases that accumulated over the prior week. I'll leave it on a weekly schedule until some period of time goes by without changes. -- Green C 15:57, 27 January 2019 (UTC)
Is it correct that all articles which contain {{ Infobox settlement}} and its derivatives are automatically in Category:Articles with short description even if they in fact do not contain short descriptions?-- Ymblanter ( talk) 16:46, 21 January 2019 (UTC)
|short_description = no
Galobtter (
pingó mió) 16:56, 21 January 2019 (UTC)
For pages in the category
Category:Bilateral relations by country (and its subcategories) I propose that a standard format for short descriptions for some pages be created, and then a bot (mine) be able to fill them in. Specifically, I suggest that pages in the style of Country 1–Country 2 relations
have the standard description of Diplomatic relations between Country 1 and Country 2
(with the short description's country names being the official names, eg "the Republic of Chad" instead of Chad). The wording is a draft, so please suggest alternatives if you dislike it. --
DannyS712 (
talk) 03:52, 25 January 2019 (UTC)
Pings to people listed as participants:
-- DannyS712 ( talk) 09:32, 25 January 2019 (UTC)
I have just become aware of short descriptions, and I have been going back adding them to some of the articles I wrote. But I am unclear about why this is supposed to be a good thing. Who can ever see these descriptions? Where can they see them, under what conditions? The descriptions all read as though this is just some technical thing that is better than the old way they used to do things, but does it actually benefit the readers?-- Gronk Oz ( talk) 07:22, 25 January 2019 (UTC)
{{Annotated link|Wikipedia:WikiProject Short descriptions}}
→
Wikipedia:WikiProject Short descriptions – Project to improve short descriptions@ RexxS: Sorry, but the short description is not displayed to all mobile users. Perhaps in can be if they use specific apps; I can see it when I use the Wikipedia app, but not when I use Google on my mobile (Samsung S9+). So it is displayed in some apps and not others. All I was hoping or is a list of which apps can be used to display it - Galobtter said above there are several suitable apps, but declined to say which ones they are.-- Gronk Oz ( talk) 01:34, 27 January 2019 (UTC)
Should redirects have short descriptions? See, eg, the redirects in Category:Television episode articles with short description and disambiguated page names, including .380 (Daredevil) and 3AM (The Punisher). If not, would people be okay with a bot run to comment-out (not remove, just hide) these short descriptions? -- DannyS712 ( talk) 23:11, 15 February 2019 (UTC)
The info page for AM (The Punisher) shows it has no 'Central description'. A redirect page doesn't use the short description when searching on mobile.The Punisher (season 1)
Redirected from 3AM (The Punisher)
{{Annotated link|The Punisher (season 1)}}
→
The Punisher (season 1) – season of television series{{Annotated link|3AM (The Punisher)}}
→
3AM (The Punisher) – season of television seriesIs there a way to make it so the Random Article link only targets pages that have no short description? Or does something else already available offer similar functionality? Zeke, the Mad Horrorist (Speak quickly) (Follow my trail) 04:00, 21 February 2019 (UTC)
I wanted to check before I open a phab ticket - wikidata's description is never supposed to be shown on enwiki, right? I tracked down the issue presented in Talk:LeBron James#Semi-protected edit request on 2 March 2019 (pasted below) and figured out that to fix it required going to wikidata and fixing it there ( [1]). If there is no enwiki short description, people should see nothing at all, right?
When searching for LeBron James in Wikipedia, the autocomplete box description for the page just says "loves dick". I can't find that in the source so I'm not sure what it used to say (presumably "American basketball player"), but it should obviously be changed back.
Thanks, -- DannyS712 ( talk) 09:57, 2 March 2019 (UTC)
As we discussed below, the WMF plan is to switch from a Wikidata-fallback to full enwiki control when there are 2 million non-blank short descriptions on enwiki, which is roughly comparable to the number of existing descriptions on Wikidata. That will help to ensure that the readers and editors who use these descriptions won't notice a sudden degradation of the feature.Galobtter ( pingó mió) 11:57, 2 March 2019 (UTC)
I just added the description to Zuzana Čaputová, who is likely to be Slovakia's president soon. That means introducing more overhead into this tiny, invisible piece of the article that is hard to access. Is there a best practice for updating short descriptions? I was opposed to this the entire time because it is redundant to Wikidata and now it seems like we are adding even more work for no real payoff here. ― Justin (koavf)❤ T☮ C☺ M☯ 23:39, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
A new Newsletter directory has been created to replace the old, out-of-date one. If your WikiProject and its taskforces have newsletters (even inactive ones), or if you know of a missing newsletter (including from sister projects like WikiSpecies), please include it in the directory! The template can be a bit tricky, so if you need help, just post the newsletter on the template's talk page and someone will add it for you.
I need some help because I think I have done something stupid. When I first started looking at Short descriptions, I set an option to display the SD on my PC display - I don't remember what that option was. It did not involve coding, I know that. The problem is that now I have enabled Shortdesc Helper, so I see every SD listed twice at the top of each page. Can anybody suggest where that first display-only option might have been, so I can turn it off?-- Gronk Oz ( talk) 12:49, 19 April 2019 (UTC)
The article System D (about a French term) has a short description that reads "Wikimedia disambiguation page". There is a disambig however for System D on enwiki: System D (disambiguation), with a short description of "Disambiguation page providing links to topics that could be referred to by the same search term". What to do in this case? Seems like it's connected to wikimedia. StaringAtTheStars ✉Talk 15:56, 13 May 2019 (UTC)
As I undersatand it, short descriptions are ordinary Wikipedia content, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. However, Wikidata uses CC0, which is incompatible with importing short descriptions from Wikipedia into Wikidata. I think this is a major drawback of the current implementation of short descriptions, as it prevents two-way interchange of these descriptions. Has there been any thought on this? -- The Anome ( talk) 15:18, 17 July 2019 (UTC)
The 'Suggested Edits' functionality in the Wikipedia Beta App links to https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Apps/Suggested_edits and https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Help:Description#Guidelines_for_descriptions_in_English. The limit that is shown inside the App is 90 characters, the Wikidata guidelines states "... In most cases, the proper length is between two and twelve words. They are not capitalized unless the first word is a proper noun.", and on Wikipedia:Short description it is stated "A target of 40 characters has been suggested, but this can be exceeded when necessary. ... Whether it should have an initial capital remains undecided, but is favored at present." This is all a bit confusing, can't these guidelines be a bit more alligned, or at least cross-referencing / explaining why this difference exists? Also, isn't it double work that the App updates the description on Wikidata, while on this WikiProject page it is stated that the plan is that Wikidata descriptions will not be shown anymore at some point in the (near) future? Best regards, Wiki-uk ( talk) 12:53, 28 May 2019 (UTC)
{{
short description|Season of American television series}}
and readers of the English Wikipedia App see a properly capitalised subtitle."Essentially, you should pretend that the description is appearing in the middle of a normal sentence, and then follow normal language rules". What's the point of that? Nowhere on any project is the description used "in the middle of a normal sentence". In fact that's expressly forbidden for the English Wikipedia by long-standing consensus established at Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Wikidata Phase 2. -- RexxS ( talk) 23:50, 21 July 2019 (UTC)
Where can I find an overview of articles without Short Description? I see there exists only an overview of articles WITH Short Description. It would also be good to be able to filter on Short Descriptions of only one word or those that are very lenghty, so below or above a certain number of characters. Wiki-uk ( talk) 16:52, 26 June 2019 (UTC)
What should we be using for the sort description for pages like History of fountains in the United States? There seems to be no way to describe it without just restating the title. - Sdkb ( talk) 18:10, 13 August 2019 (UTC)
{{Short description|none}}
may be used.. --
Michael Bednarek (
talk) 03:10, 14 August 2019 (UTC)Hello WikiProject members. I was thinking of a way to increase participation and enthusiasm in the project. I thought a short blitz might be ideal, say 1 or 2 days or maybe something as short as an hour or two? The blitz would be rather informal, just put your name down and start at the arranged time, those with the most shortdescs added receive some kind of award. In terms of how to count the number of short descs added, we could use the counter tool on wmflabs. Write down the number before the blitz starts and write down the number after then get a total. I think it should be kept short (<2 days) as doing something as repetitive as adding short descs for a long time would get painful and people would lose interest - other WikiProjects do week/month blitzes/drives but theirs include something more varied and interesting eg. Reviewing GANs. I hope that people like the idea and I am looking forward to hearing any improvements that could be made. Regards, Willbb234 Talk (please {{ ping}} me in replies) 19:15, 23 August 2019 (UTC)
Extended content
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Willbb234 Talk (please {{ ping}} me in replies) 21:30, 23 August 2019 (UTC)
Willbb234 Talk (please {{ ping}} me in replies) 21:34, 23 August 2019 (UTC)
Willbb234 Talk (please {{ ping}} me in replies) 21:36, 23 August 2019 (UTC) |
There is a discussion about adding automatic short descriptions to Infobox school at Template talk:Infobox school#Automatic short descriptions which may concern the project. -- Trialpears ( talk) 11:23, 25 August 2019 (UTC)
Having just completed Category:Moths of Europe, assisted by WP:JWB, I have learned the hard way that:
Are there any bot operators who would be willing to run updates based on rules suggested by non bot users? MichaelMaggs ( talk) 20:55, 29 July 2019 (UTC)
There are a lot of categories for articles that have short descriptions. How can I find ones that just don't have any manual short description? — Preceding unsigned comment added by DemonDays64 ( talk • contribs) 04:30, 9 October 2019 (UTC)
There is currently a discussion going on at Wikidata that folks here may be interested in commenting on. In brief: a vandal's change to the "description" field at the Wikidata Gay (Q592) item showed up immediately as the " short description" at the top of Wikipedia's Gay article.
Although it affects Wikipedia, the locus of the problem appears to be Wikidata, so the discussion is being hosted there. Your feedback would be appreciated at WD:CHAT. Thanks, Mathglot ( talk) 01:22, 13 October 2019 (UTC)
Regarding the values "blank", "none", and
, I question whether these values are better than nothing.
The text in section What if a short description is redundant? currently reads:
blank
, or a non-breaking space, just leave it like that, as it shows that someone has checked and decided that a description is not necessary.Regarding the "leave it like that" part: apparently, none of the values none
,
[a] blank
, or
will block the wikidata value, so why do we say to leave it alone? Even a simple alternative like copying the article title into the template, while adding no information would at least block imported vandalism. Wouldn't that be better? Otherwise, what about {{short description|Needs short description}}
?
Mathglot (
talk) 21:59, 14 October 2019 (UTC)
{{short description|Needs short description}}
in would be wrong if a short description is not needed, and could be seen as gaming the system by WMF, and therefore an excuse to refuse to turn off the Wikidata feed, or they could just program the app to treat it as no short description and not display it, which would be unproductive. If an article actually does need a short description, it is better to put one in if reasonably possible. I accept that there are articles which are so badly written that it is not possible to come up with a short description as one cannot work out what they are supposed to be about. I just move on. Cheers, · · ·
Peter Southwood
(talk): 09:24, 15 October 2019 (UTC)Notes
There is a discussion about the formatting of short descriptions for certain United States radio stations at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Radio Stations#Short descriptions for radio station pages which may concern the project. Raymie ( t • c) 20:37, 18 October 2019 (UTC)
There are a lot of redirect and disambiguation pages in Wikipedia. Here are the categories, although they're not much help [2] and [3]
We could remove them, after all they're kinda outside of this project's scope... but there are tons of disambiguous and redirect pages with short descriptions...
... so therefore a hopefully better suggestion would be to make those pages be represented as yellow in the progress bar - between green and red. [Though yellow would probably overlap the green and red if it was implemented.]
I mean, sure the purpose of this project is not the progress bar (though it is a nice side effect), but come on, there are about 4,300,000 pages left.
Now, my more helpful suggestion is that someone take the articles without a short description, and then order it based on how popular it is (Aargh, where did that list of the 10000 most popular pages go??)
This would be helpful because we could effectively edit pages where more of everyone's interests are. Much more mobile views would be 'supplemented'. AltoStev Talk 21:07, 19 October 2019 (UTC)
I'm having some trouble figuring out standard descriptions for sports teams' seasons (e.g., 2016–17 Arsenal F.C. season) and sports championships (e.g., 1995 NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Tournament). Any suggestions?
OTOH, for discographies I suggest: [Cataloging of published recordings by ___ ]. (I freely admit that I s/t/o/l/e/ copied this from an article, though I don't recall which one, never mind who coined it.) Similarly, for filmographies I suggest: [Cataloging of roles by ___ ]. E.g., Shruti Haasan filmography: "Cataloging of roles by Indian actress Shruti Haasan". I'm not suggesting that these be codified as standard—I'm just offering them for use and modification at the users' personal discretion. — DocWatson42 ( talk) 03:47, 7 November 2019 (UTC)
Hello, I've just created an automated system capable of extracting short descriptions of the form "[Nationality] [Career]" from the first sentance in an article. A list of about 200 short descriptions generated by the system can be found at User:Trialpears/Automatic biography short descriptions, all of which I've reviewed and found satisfactory, although in some cases not perfect. I believe this system is reliable enough for deployment by a bot, but would like your input before filing a BRFA. When dealing with BLPs it's always of utmost importance to not spread misinformation, but since it extract information word by word from the article this system won't experience any BLP issues as long as the article doesn't contain any from the start. I've also notified WP:WPBIO of this discussion. -- Trialpears ( talk) 19:29, 29 October 2019 (UTC)
incategory:"Living people"
and added all enteries where it succesfully generated a description to
User:Trialpears/Automatic biography short descriptions. There were no human selection bias involved. The big step that made them this good was disposing of everything longer than 40 characters, which is the length recommended by
WP:SHORTDESC. This removed all the cases where it selected too much text as well as the cases where the list of careers/attributes simply was too long to be used as a short description. I also check that the description contain a nationality.|bot=
parameter. Pherhaps it should sort per bot task as well incase of more bots or improvements to this one. ‑‑
Trialpears (
talk) 08:02, 8 November 2019 (UTC)
Not sure how best to fix the issue. FYI Template talk:Annotated link -- GhostInTheMachine ( talk) 14:56, 23 November 2019 (UTC)
@ Why is this a username?: it's called looking at your contributions. Willbb234 Talk (please {{ ping}} me in replies) 19:08, 1 January 2020 (UTC)
@Willbb234 Yeah, i know. I'm trying to help the mood. Aslo,i need to know Formatting better. Know where i can start? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Why is this a username? ( talk • contribs)
As a mobile user who loves to waste all of his language class, is there a good way to start working on the project? I can confirm that short descriptions are quite useful. I want to help with the project but I do not know how to create a short description. I also do not know what I am supposed to work on. CreeperWert ( talk) 04:06, 22 January 2020 (UTC)
@ RexxS: I'm wondering why there isn't a category which lists pages that don't have Short descriptions? I quite often encounter pages that already have short descriptions and its irritating and time consuming, is there no way to make this easier? Mr. Cuckoo ( talk) 01:31, 31 January 2020 (UTC)
@ RexxS: Thanks for that explanation. I suppose you're right. I stumbled upon this project recently and I think it's an excellent little thing that could do some good. But I'm worried about it's survival. With the dozen or so active participants that it has it seems like it will take years to complete, and that's assuming no one gives up or goes dark Mr. Cuckoo ( talk) 02:19, 31 January 2020 (UTC)
I noticed that there really isn't any guidelines on WP:SHORTDESC regarding punctuation. The Project Page mentions that terminal punctuation isn't needed for sentence fragments, but how about short descriptions with proper sentences? Also, does "isn't needed" mean "not allowed" or "it's your choice"? It feels a bit ambiguous. I recently had one of my short descriptions reverted for including a period, I was referred to WP:SHORTDESC as an explanation, but as I've said, there was nothing there regarding punctuation. I'd like for this to be quickly resolved and for WP:SHORTDESC to be edited so that there is no ambiguity on this matter. Mr. Cuckoo ( talk) 12:09, 1 February 2020 (UTC)
Currently, the "ordinary" user does not see the SD at all. (I assume.) So how might the search look with SD? I suspect that we need a body of worked examples and these will help us solidify the SD guidelines. FTR, I prefer short sentences starting with a Capital letter, but not ending with a full stop GhostInTheMachine ( talk) 16:57, 1 February 2020 (UTC)
You are invited to join the discussion at
Template talk:Set index article#Short description. ‑‑
Trialpears (
talk) 19:35, 13 February 2020 (UTC)
I think this question needs to be definitively settled. (please point me to any prior discussions if those exist.) On many project space pages the default wikidata description is "wikimedia project page". Should those be imported? Do these pages need a short description? Should a proper short description be added? JJMC89 for example believes that these pages shouldn't use a generic short description. see diff and separate discussion. same goes for the ubiquitous "Wikimedia list article". Hydromania ( talk) 05:34, 25 October 2019 (UTC)
@ The Eloquent Peasant: Go for "Wikipedia list article" in nearly all cases. Disambiguation pages (always?) include a template {{ Disambiguation}}) which then sets a fixed SD (via {{ Disambiguation page short description}}). Perhaps all lists should also do something like that? That way the {{ List page}} template sets the SD for the list, is simpler to switch over and gives us other things if we want. @ RexxS: Is there a list-related project that is already aiming for something like this? GhostInTheMachine ( talk) 00:14, 21 February 2020 (UTC)
On Jun Hong Lu, I have changed the SD twice to something I think is more descriptive to the average reader. A new user who seems to feel some level of ownership over the article changed it back. Is this just a matter for the article talk page, or is there a place to get better input from editors with SD expertise. MB 03:55, 8 March 2020 (UTC)
Although only 5,518,065 articles are in
Category:Articles with short description, there are presently 2,083,124 articles with a {{
short description}} template, according to a search for hastemplate:"short description"
in articles.
I don't know why there's a discrepancy, but I'll just remind everyone of this:
Stage 1: Wikipedia editors will populate the magic word (SHORTDESC) on Wikipedia pages. During that period:
Stage 2: Once Wikipedia editors write ~2 million descriptions, we'll switch to entirely Wikipedia-hosted descriptions. From that point:
It would be nice to know that preparations are underway for stage 2. -- RexxS ( talk) 19:31, 23 March 2020 (UTC)
hastemplate:"short description" hastemplate:"disambiguation"
gives 190,996 results, so we're still missing some, but I get the point. We're probably safest to look at the size of
Category:Articles with short description, as that's likely to be the most conservative estimate. --
RexxS (
talk) 20:00, 23 March 2020 (UTC) You are invited to join the discussion at
Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_COVID-19#Short_descriptions_of_country/region_articles. {{u|
Sdkb}}
talk 06:43, 6 April 2020 (UTC)
Dab pages have a short description that can be customized. This is problematic for two reasons. The first one is that it is much longer than the recommended size of 40 characters. If follows that if a dab page appears in a list such as the "See also" section of another dab page, the use of {{ annotated link}} will provide an awful display. So, a short description reduced to, say "Disambiguation page" would be much better.
The second reason is that some dab pages disambiguate between pages that belong to the same category. For example, for Primitive polynomial, a better short description could be "Page providing links to two mathematical concepts with the same name". Here the word "mathematical" is essential, as a reader is not supposed to know that "polynomial" is a word specific to mathematics. I have no example under hand, but there are certainely dab pages that link only to mathematical articles, and whose name does not imply that only mathematics is involved. For an example (not a dab page) for which it is fundamental that "mathematics" appears in the short description, see Free module (if "mathematics" would be removed from the short description, a non mathematician could not imagine that this is about mathematics). D.Lazard ( talk) 11:10, 22 April 2020 (UTC)
Team, we're at 1.94 million articles. Great work so far, and probably only a mnonth or so more til we hit the magic 2 million. Keep going! Best, UnitedStatesian ( talk) 15:57, 17 May 2020 (UTC)
You are invited to join the discussion at
Wikipedia talk:Shortdesc helper#Capitalization for export feature. {{u|
Sdkb}}
talk 18:59, 7 July 2020 (UTC)
What description should I put for soft redirects? Is it the same as hard redirects?
Also feature request: Expand the width of the shortdesc helper automatically when the description gets too long
Also here's a category-ish: /info/en/?search=Special:LonelyPages AltoStev Talk 17:37, 11 July 2020 (UTC)
There is an RfC active proposing bot-importing short descriptions to and from Wikidata at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Synchronising short descriptions and Wikidata descriptions
Various options are proposed, including filling the gaps and overwriting existing content.
Cheers, · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 09:48, 7 August 2020 (UTC)
Hello,
I made an ad for WikiProject Short descriptions and was wondering if I should put it on the main project page? This is it:
Annoying animated image
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|
Regards, Giraffer ( munch) 08:52, 22 July 2020 (UTC)
As far as I can tell, we have about 32,000 pages in Category:Good articles (39,814), and about 18,000 of them are still missing short descriptions.
Of the 5,800 pages in Category:Featured articles (6,525), just under 2,000 articles are missing short descriptions.
In case anyone here is looking for something to work on. – Jonesey95 ( talk) 15:25, 9 July 2020 (UTC)
All Featured articles now Done.
MichaelMaggs (
talk) 21:15, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
Hi. I've noticed a few articles on my watchlist have recently had their short descriptions dramatically altered, in some cases making them almost as long as the text of the article itself. These changes raise potentially significant problems. For just two examples, consider the edits on Monarch butterfly ("Importing Wikidata short description: "Milkweed butterfly in the family Nymphalidae") and Persicaria perfoliata ("Changing short description from "Species of plant" to "Species of flowering plant in the knotweed family Polygonaceae"). Both of these descriptions include a taxonomic classification down to the level of family (not only that, they give both the common name of the family AND the scientific name), a rank which is notoriously unstable, and prone to constant rearrangement. These organisms could conceivably be in entirely different families a week from now, at the rate that new family-level classifications are being published for insects and flowering plants. As an example of this exact issue, consider the Mantis article; when it was created in 2005, there were 8 families in the order Mantodea. In 2019, the most recent revision, there were 29 families, and almost none of the members of the original 8 families are still in the families they were in back then. This has necessitated hundreds upon hundreds of edits, affecting nearly every article in WP that discusses any mantises, just to change the category links. It is quite possible that the next revision of Mantodea will remove some of those 29 families, create others, and for all any of us know it could be published tomorrow. The point I am trying to make is this: WP already has a massive hierarchy of categories that serve to organize articles by their classification, and even that is somewhat redundant given the nature of taxoboxes. It seems to me that the concept of the "Short Description" is not intended to be yet another redundant system of taxonomic classification, so I cannot quite understand why people believe that "short descriptions" going down to the level of family are a good idea, especially when organismal family ranks are NOT stable. I would argue, fairly strongly, that "Species of butterfly" is perfectly acceptable for the Monarch article, and "Species of flowering plant" is perfectly acceptable for the Persicaria article. Is there any chance that the people who are policy-makers in this WikiProject could devise and enforce a clearer policy regarding the over-specificity of taxonomic categories used in short descriptions? Dyanega ( talk) 21:58, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
A short description added by a bot should be added at the end of an article. This is somewhat counter-intuitive, so stay with me.
If a category of articles has an infobox, then the SD can generally be best created by the infobox from the data explicitly provided to the infobox.
The infobox sets the SD with the |noreplace
option so that it does not overwrite any explicit SD set at the top of the article.
If a bot is adding a SD to an article with an infobox that does not yet do this, then the SD should be below the infobox.
Thus when the infobox is later updated to set the SD, the SD added by the bot (also with the |noreplace
option) will not overwrite the infobox version, or the explicit version added at the top.
If the bot instead adds the SD at the top, then any subsequent SD from the infobox will be hidden.
Pause. Ponder. Discuss. — GhostInTheMachine talk to me 19:29, 20 August 2020 (UTC)
noreplace
option for short descriptions generated by templates, since those templates always appear below the top of the page. The noreplace
option tells the page renderer to ignore the template-generated SD if another SD is present on the page.|noreplace
is very unlikely to gain support. The original debate is at
phab:T193857 and you may find
User:Tgr's comments instructive. --
RexxS (
talk) 23:45, 20 August 2020 (UTC)
noreplace
may be the best we can do. –
Jonesey95 (
talk) 00:21, 21 August 2020 (UTC)
Has anyone explored the use of recurrent neural networks for auto-generating short descriptions? Since we have a training set of over 2 million, I think it should be possible to reasonably good descriptions using LSTM or GRU-based techniques. SD0001 ( talk) 16:45, 20 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 2 | Archive 3 |
(Discussion transferred from User talk:Wittylama)
Hi Wittylama, Please read the background and history of the {{ short description}} at Wikipedia:WikiProject Short descriptions, where I think you will find that the subject has had sufficient discussion for the template to be applied, and for Wikidata descriptions to be used where they are good enough. You may also take into account that this was imposed upon Wikipedia by WMF when they decided to overrule consensus not to allow the use of Wikidata short descriptions until there are at least 2 million local to Wikipedia. Since you have reverted this instance, I leave it to you to provide a better version. I do not have the time to debate each case in isolation. Please take any discussion on this matter to the project talk page and ping me if you want my attention. Cheers, · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 10:02, 9 May 2018 (UTC)
"...Wikidata descriptions will be permanently discontinued "Citation, please? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 13:52, 9 May 2018 (UTC)
In stage one of this process, if blanked the description, then it would be easy for someone to run a bot and put that on every page. I have said consistently that mass blanking of the descriptions is not going to work for us. Once there are ~2 million descriptions on English WP articles, we move to stage two, and at that point any page that doesn't have a SHORTDESC magic word will automatically be blank. This is the same thing I've said throughout the discussion.(my emphasis added) · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 15:37, 9 May 2018 (UTC)
Wittylama, This discussion should be on the project talk page, as I requested above. With your permission I will relocate it. · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 15:29, 9 May 2018 (UTC)
Hmm. If we're going to start to see edit wars over the presence or not of {{
short description}}
, it looks as if a further community discussion may be necessary before continuing with this project. Where descriptions in Wikidata are missing, inadequate, or incorrect, should we continue adding or changing descriptions locally on enwiki, or should we all pile into Wikidata and add or change them there? Where descriptions in Wikidata are adequate, should we copy them over or continue to draw them from Wikidata?
: Noyster
(talk), 09:51, 10 May 2018 (UTC)
Didn't we just have an RfC? In the village pump? Advertised on CENT? That decided we were going to have local descriptions and discontinue the use of Wikidata descriptions? And another RfC an year ago that had a consensus not to use wikidata descriptions? If someone wants to change then start a bloody RfC. If not, then allow the descriptions to be added locally. (I'll also note that there is no real centralization across wikis for these descriptions unlike other data like interwikis or numbers; the english description is only going to be written by those in english and english wikipedia and putting it here grants it visibility meaning it'll get maintained and not vandalized; there is no more effort doing descriptions here than on wikidata; in fact it is easier to do things here because we can generate consistent descriptions en masse from infoboxes) Galobtter ( pingó mió) 13:07, 10 May 2018 (UTC)
I'm as puzzled as Wittylama by all the spam produced by pointless edits which merely replicate Wikidata's descriptions, thereby increasing Wikipedia's technical debt. I hope someone has an exit plan, in case the community ever changes mind on allowing such redundancy, including a bot able to remove all duplicate descriptions and update Wikidata's descriptions with the local ones which were actually supposed to update the Wikidata description. Nemo 15:25, 21 July 2019 (UTC)
A Bot Request was made by User:Bhunacat10
Do you think this is a good idea?
Convert this:
{{SHORTDESC:<xyz>}}
..to this:
{{Short description|<xyz>}}
The rationale from #Which articles have a short description on Wikipedia?:
... about 400 are using the SHORTDESC magic word. These should be converted to the standard {{ Short description}} template for ease of maintenance.
Do you think this is a good idea to have a background process continually checking for and converting these? Bot writers are required to verify there is consensus. -- Green C 14:17, 13 January 2019 (UTC)
Could the bot move short descriptions from odd places in the text to the top (or within a few lines of the top) at the same time? · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 10:51, 15 January 2019 (UTC)
{{SHORTDESC:<xyz>}}
descriptions :); also moving to the top would be good as Pbsouthwood said.
Galobtter (
pingó mió) 13:41, 17 January 2019 (UTC){{SHORTDESC:<xyz>}}
since that is what it searches for (only a few hundred). Better solution would be a task that checks all instances of {{Short description|<xyz>}}
for moving. --
Green
C 14:57, 17 January 2019 (UTC)
update: After 1 week, the script ran automatically on schedule and converted 6 cases that accumulated over the prior week. I'll leave it on a weekly schedule until some period of time goes by without changes. -- Green C 15:57, 27 January 2019 (UTC)
Is it correct that all articles which contain {{ Infobox settlement}} and its derivatives are automatically in Category:Articles with short description even if they in fact do not contain short descriptions?-- Ymblanter ( talk) 16:46, 21 January 2019 (UTC)
|short_description = no
Galobtter (
pingó mió) 16:56, 21 January 2019 (UTC)
For pages in the category
Category:Bilateral relations by country (and its subcategories) I propose that a standard format for short descriptions for some pages be created, and then a bot (mine) be able to fill them in. Specifically, I suggest that pages in the style of Country 1–Country 2 relations
have the standard description of Diplomatic relations between Country 1 and Country 2
(with the short description's country names being the official names, eg "the Republic of Chad" instead of Chad). The wording is a draft, so please suggest alternatives if you dislike it. --
DannyS712 (
talk) 03:52, 25 January 2019 (UTC)
Pings to people listed as participants:
-- DannyS712 ( talk) 09:32, 25 January 2019 (UTC)
I have just become aware of short descriptions, and I have been going back adding them to some of the articles I wrote. But I am unclear about why this is supposed to be a good thing. Who can ever see these descriptions? Where can they see them, under what conditions? The descriptions all read as though this is just some technical thing that is better than the old way they used to do things, but does it actually benefit the readers?-- Gronk Oz ( talk) 07:22, 25 January 2019 (UTC)
{{Annotated link|Wikipedia:WikiProject Short descriptions}}
→
Wikipedia:WikiProject Short descriptions – Project to improve short descriptions@ RexxS: Sorry, but the short description is not displayed to all mobile users. Perhaps in can be if they use specific apps; I can see it when I use the Wikipedia app, but not when I use Google on my mobile (Samsung S9+). So it is displayed in some apps and not others. All I was hoping or is a list of which apps can be used to display it - Galobtter said above there are several suitable apps, but declined to say which ones they are.-- Gronk Oz ( talk) 01:34, 27 January 2019 (UTC)
Should redirects have short descriptions? See, eg, the redirects in Category:Television episode articles with short description and disambiguated page names, including .380 (Daredevil) and 3AM (The Punisher). If not, would people be okay with a bot run to comment-out (not remove, just hide) these short descriptions? -- DannyS712 ( talk) 23:11, 15 February 2019 (UTC)
The info page for AM (The Punisher) shows it has no 'Central description'. A redirect page doesn't use the short description when searching on mobile.The Punisher (season 1)
Redirected from 3AM (The Punisher)
{{Annotated link|The Punisher (season 1)}}
→
The Punisher (season 1) – season of television series{{Annotated link|3AM (The Punisher)}}
→
3AM (The Punisher) – season of television seriesIs there a way to make it so the Random Article link only targets pages that have no short description? Or does something else already available offer similar functionality? Zeke, the Mad Horrorist (Speak quickly) (Follow my trail) 04:00, 21 February 2019 (UTC)
I wanted to check before I open a phab ticket - wikidata's description is never supposed to be shown on enwiki, right? I tracked down the issue presented in Talk:LeBron James#Semi-protected edit request on 2 March 2019 (pasted below) and figured out that to fix it required going to wikidata and fixing it there ( [1]). If there is no enwiki short description, people should see nothing at all, right?
When searching for LeBron James in Wikipedia, the autocomplete box description for the page just says "loves dick". I can't find that in the source so I'm not sure what it used to say (presumably "American basketball player"), but it should obviously be changed back.
Thanks, -- DannyS712 ( talk) 09:57, 2 March 2019 (UTC)
As we discussed below, the WMF plan is to switch from a Wikidata-fallback to full enwiki control when there are 2 million non-blank short descriptions on enwiki, which is roughly comparable to the number of existing descriptions on Wikidata. That will help to ensure that the readers and editors who use these descriptions won't notice a sudden degradation of the feature.Galobtter ( pingó mió) 11:57, 2 March 2019 (UTC)
I just added the description to Zuzana Čaputová, who is likely to be Slovakia's president soon. That means introducing more overhead into this tiny, invisible piece of the article that is hard to access. Is there a best practice for updating short descriptions? I was opposed to this the entire time because it is redundant to Wikidata and now it seems like we are adding even more work for no real payoff here. ― Justin (koavf)❤ T☮ C☺ M☯ 23:39, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
A new Newsletter directory has been created to replace the old, out-of-date one. If your WikiProject and its taskforces have newsletters (even inactive ones), or if you know of a missing newsletter (including from sister projects like WikiSpecies), please include it in the directory! The template can be a bit tricky, so if you need help, just post the newsletter on the template's talk page and someone will add it for you.
I need some help because I think I have done something stupid. When I first started looking at Short descriptions, I set an option to display the SD on my PC display - I don't remember what that option was. It did not involve coding, I know that. The problem is that now I have enabled Shortdesc Helper, so I see every SD listed twice at the top of each page. Can anybody suggest where that first display-only option might have been, so I can turn it off?-- Gronk Oz ( talk) 12:49, 19 April 2019 (UTC)
The article System D (about a French term) has a short description that reads "Wikimedia disambiguation page". There is a disambig however for System D on enwiki: System D (disambiguation), with a short description of "Disambiguation page providing links to topics that could be referred to by the same search term". What to do in this case? Seems like it's connected to wikimedia. StaringAtTheStars ✉Talk 15:56, 13 May 2019 (UTC)
As I undersatand it, short descriptions are ordinary Wikipedia content, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. However, Wikidata uses CC0, which is incompatible with importing short descriptions from Wikipedia into Wikidata. I think this is a major drawback of the current implementation of short descriptions, as it prevents two-way interchange of these descriptions. Has there been any thought on this? -- The Anome ( talk) 15:18, 17 July 2019 (UTC)
The 'Suggested Edits' functionality in the Wikipedia Beta App links to https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Apps/Suggested_edits and https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Help:Description#Guidelines_for_descriptions_in_English. The limit that is shown inside the App is 90 characters, the Wikidata guidelines states "... In most cases, the proper length is between two and twelve words. They are not capitalized unless the first word is a proper noun.", and on Wikipedia:Short description it is stated "A target of 40 characters has been suggested, but this can be exceeded when necessary. ... Whether it should have an initial capital remains undecided, but is favored at present." This is all a bit confusing, can't these guidelines be a bit more alligned, or at least cross-referencing / explaining why this difference exists? Also, isn't it double work that the App updates the description on Wikidata, while on this WikiProject page it is stated that the plan is that Wikidata descriptions will not be shown anymore at some point in the (near) future? Best regards, Wiki-uk ( talk) 12:53, 28 May 2019 (UTC)
{{
short description|Season of American television series}}
and readers of the English Wikipedia App see a properly capitalised subtitle."Essentially, you should pretend that the description is appearing in the middle of a normal sentence, and then follow normal language rules". What's the point of that? Nowhere on any project is the description used "in the middle of a normal sentence". In fact that's expressly forbidden for the English Wikipedia by long-standing consensus established at Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Wikidata Phase 2. -- RexxS ( talk) 23:50, 21 July 2019 (UTC)
Where can I find an overview of articles without Short Description? I see there exists only an overview of articles WITH Short Description. It would also be good to be able to filter on Short Descriptions of only one word or those that are very lenghty, so below or above a certain number of characters. Wiki-uk ( talk) 16:52, 26 June 2019 (UTC)
What should we be using for the sort description for pages like History of fountains in the United States? There seems to be no way to describe it without just restating the title. - Sdkb ( talk) 18:10, 13 August 2019 (UTC)
{{Short description|none}}
may be used.. --
Michael Bednarek (
talk) 03:10, 14 August 2019 (UTC)Hello WikiProject members. I was thinking of a way to increase participation and enthusiasm in the project. I thought a short blitz might be ideal, say 1 or 2 days or maybe something as short as an hour or two? The blitz would be rather informal, just put your name down and start at the arranged time, those with the most shortdescs added receive some kind of award. In terms of how to count the number of short descs added, we could use the counter tool on wmflabs. Write down the number before the blitz starts and write down the number after then get a total. I think it should be kept short (<2 days) as doing something as repetitive as adding short descs for a long time would get painful and people would lose interest - other WikiProjects do week/month blitzes/drives but theirs include something more varied and interesting eg. Reviewing GANs. I hope that people like the idea and I am looking forward to hearing any improvements that could be made. Regards, Willbb234 Talk (please {{ ping}} me in replies) 19:15, 23 August 2019 (UTC)
Extended content
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Willbb234 Talk (please {{ ping}} me in replies) 21:30, 23 August 2019 (UTC)
Willbb234 Talk (please {{ ping}} me in replies) 21:34, 23 August 2019 (UTC)
Willbb234 Talk (please {{ ping}} me in replies) 21:36, 23 August 2019 (UTC) |
There is a discussion about adding automatic short descriptions to Infobox school at Template talk:Infobox school#Automatic short descriptions which may concern the project. -- Trialpears ( talk) 11:23, 25 August 2019 (UTC)
Having just completed Category:Moths of Europe, assisted by WP:JWB, I have learned the hard way that:
Are there any bot operators who would be willing to run updates based on rules suggested by non bot users? MichaelMaggs ( talk) 20:55, 29 July 2019 (UTC)
There are a lot of categories for articles that have short descriptions. How can I find ones that just don't have any manual short description? — Preceding unsigned comment added by DemonDays64 ( talk • contribs) 04:30, 9 October 2019 (UTC)
There is currently a discussion going on at Wikidata that folks here may be interested in commenting on. In brief: a vandal's change to the "description" field at the Wikidata Gay (Q592) item showed up immediately as the " short description" at the top of Wikipedia's Gay article.
Although it affects Wikipedia, the locus of the problem appears to be Wikidata, so the discussion is being hosted there. Your feedback would be appreciated at WD:CHAT. Thanks, Mathglot ( talk) 01:22, 13 October 2019 (UTC)
Regarding the values "blank", "none", and
, I question whether these values are better than nothing.
The text in section What if a short description is redundant? currently reads:
blank
, or a non-breaking space, just leave it like that, as it shows that someone has checked and decided that a description is not necessary.Regarding the "leave it like that" part: apparently, none of the values none
,
[a] blank
, or
will block the wikidata value, so why do we say to leave it alone? Even a simple alternative like copying the article title into the template, while adding no information would at least block imported vandalism. Wouldn't that be better? Otherwise, what about {{short description|Needs short description}}
?
Mathglot (
talk) 21:59, 14 October 2019 (UTC)
{{short description|Needs short description}}
in would be wrong if a short description is not needed, and could be seen as gaming the system by WMF, and therefore an excuse to refuse to turn off the Wikidata feed, or they could just program the app to treat it as no short description and not display it, which would be unproductive. If an article actually does need a short description, it is better to put one in if reasonably possible. I accept that there are articles which are so badly written that it is not possible to come up with a short description as one cannot work out what they are supposed to be about. I just move on. Cheers, · · ·
Peter Southwood
(talk): 09:24, 15 October 2019 (UTC)Notes
There is a discussion about the formatting of short descriptions for certain United States radio stations at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Radio Stations#Short descriptions for radio station pages which may concern the project. Raymie ( t • c) 20:37, 18 October 2019 (UTC)
There are a lot of redirect and disambiguation pages in Wikipedia. Here are the categories, although they're not much help [2] and [3]
We could remove them, after all they're kinda outside of this project's scope... but there are tons of disambiguous and redirect pages with short descriptions...
... so therefore a hopefully better suggestion would be to make those pages be represented as yellow in the progress bar - between green and red. [Though yellow would probably overlap the green and red if it was implemented.]
I mean, sure the purpose of this project is not the progress bar (though it is a nice side effect), but come on, there are about 4,300,000 pages left.
Now, my more helpful suggestion is that someone take the articles without a short description, and then order it based on how popular it is (Aargh, where did that list of the 10000 most popular pages go??)
This would be helpful because we could effectively edit pages where more of everyone's interests are. Much more mobile views would be 'supplemented'. AltoStev Talk 21:07, 19 October 2019 (UTC)
I'm having some trouble figuring out standard descriptions for sports teams' seasons (e.g., 2016–17 Arsenal F.C. season) and sports championships (e.g., 1995 NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Tournament). Any suggestions?
OTOH, for discographies I suggest: [Cataloging of published recordings by ___ ]. (I freely admit that I s/t/o/l/e/ copied this from an article, though I don't recall which one, never mind who coined it.) Similarly, for filmographies I suggest: [Cataloging of roles by ___ ]. E.g., Shruti Haasan filmography: "Cataloging of roles by Indian actress Shruti Haasan". I'm not suggesting that these be codified as standard—I'm just offering them for use and modification at the users' personal discretion. — DocWatson42 ( talk) 03:47, 7 November 2019 (UTC)
Hello, I've just created an automated system capable of extracting short descriptions of the form "[Nationality] [Career]" from the first sentance in an article. A list of about 200 short descriptions generated by the system can be found at User:Trialpears/Automatic biography short descriptions, all of which I've reviewed and found satisfactory, although in some cases not perfect. I believe this system is reliable enough for deployment by a bot, but would like your input before filing a BRFA. When dealing with BLPs it's always of utmost importance to not spread misinformation, but since it extract information word by word from the article this system won't experience any BLP issues as long as the article doesn't contain any from the start. I've also notified WP:WPBIO of this discussion. -- Trialpears ( talk) 19:29, 29 October 2019 (UTC)
incategory:"Living people"
and added all enteries where it succesfully generated a description to
User:Trialpears/Automatic biography short descriptions. There were no human selection bias involved. The big step that made them this good was disposing of everything longer than 40 characters, which is the length recommended by
WP:SHORTDESC. This removed all the cases where it selected too much text as well as the cases where the list of careers/attributes simply was too long to be used as a short description. I also check that the description contain a nationality.|bot=
parameter. Pherhaps it should sort per bot task as well incase of more bots or improvements to this one. ‑‑
Trialpears (
talk) 08:02, 8 November 2019 (UTC)
Not sure how best to fix the issue. FYI Template talk:Annotated link -- GhostInTheMachine ( talk) 14:56, 23 November 2019 (UTC)
@ Why is this a username?: it's called looking at your contributions. Willbb234 Talk (please {{ ping}} me in replies) 19:08, 1 January 2020 (UTC)
@Willbb234 Yeah, i know. I'm trying to help the mood. Aslo,i need to know Formatting better. Know where i can start? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Why is this a username? ( talk • contribs)
As a mobile user who loves to waste all of his language class, is there a good way to start working on the project? I can confirm that short descriptions are quite useful. I want to help with the project but I do not know how to create a short description. I also do not know what I am supposed to work on. CreeperWert ( talk) 04:06, 22 January 2020 (UTC)
@ RexxS: I'm wondering why there isn't a category which lists pages that don't have Short descriptions? I quite often encounter pages that already have short descriptions and its irritating and time consuming, is there no way to make this easier? Mr. Cuckoo ( talk) 01:31, 31 January 2020 (UTC)
@ RexxS: Thanks for that explanation. I suppose you're right. I stumbled upon this project recently and I think it's an excellent little thing that could do some good. But I'm worried about it's survival. With the dozen or so active participants that it has it seems like it will take years to complete, and that's assuming no one gives up or goes dark Mr. Cuckoo ( talk) 02:19, 31 January 2020 (UTC)
I noticed that there really isn't any guidelines on WP:SHORTDESC regarding punctuation. The Project Page mentions that terminal punctuation isn't needed for sentence fragments, but how about short descriptions with proper sentences? Also, does "isn't needed" mean "not allowed" or "it's your choice"? It feels a bit ambiguous. I recently had one of my short descriptions reverted for including a period, I was referred to WP:SHORTDESC as an explanation, but as I've said, there was nothing there regarding punctuation. I'd like for this to be quickly resolved and for WP:SHORTDESC to be edited so that there is no ambiguity on this matter. Mr. Cuckoo ( talk) 12:09, 1 February 2020 (UTC)
Currently, the "ordinary" user does not see the SD at all. (I assume.) So how might the search look with SD? I suspect that we need a body of worked examples and these will help us solidify the SD guidelines. FTR, I prefer short sentences starting with a Capital letter, but not ending with a full stop GhostInTheMachine ( talk) 16:57, 1 February 2020 (UTC)
You are invited to join the discussion at
Template talk:Set index article#Short description. ‑‑
Trialpears (
talk) 19:35, 13 February 2020 (UTC)
I think this question needs to be definitively settled. (please point me to any prior discussions if those exist.) On many project space pages the default wikidata description is "wikimedia project page". Should those be imported? Do these pages need a short description? Should a proper short description be added? JJMC89 for example believes that these pages shouldn't use a generic short description. see diff and separate discussion. same goes for the ubiquitous "Wikimedia list article". Hydromania ( talk) 05:34, 25 October 2019 (UTC)
@ The Eloquent Peasant: Go for "Wikipedia list article" in nearly all cases. Disambiguation pages (always?) include a template {{ Disambiguation}}) which then sets a fixed SD (via {{ Disambiguation page short description}}). Perhaps all lists should also do something like that? That way the {{ List page}} template sets the SD for the list, is simpler to switch over and gives us other things if we want. @ RexxS: Is there a list-related project that is already aiming for something like this? GhostInTheMachine ( talk) 00:14, 21 February 2020 (UTC)
On Jun Hong Lu, I have changed the SD twice to something I think is more descriptive to the average reader. A new user who seems to feel some level of ownership over the article changed it back. Is this just a matter for the article talk page, or is there a place to get better input from editors with SD expertise. MB 03:55, 8 March 2020 (UTC)
Although only 5,518,065 articles are in
Category:Articles with short description, there are presently 2,083,124 articles with a {{
short description}} template, according to a search for hastemplate:"short description"
in articles.
I don't know why there's a discrepancy, but I'll just remind everyone of this:
Stage 1: Wikipedia editors will populate the magic word (SHORTDESC) on Wikipedia pages. During that period:
Stage 2: Once Wikipedia editors write ~2 million descriptions, we'll switch to entirely Wikipedia-hosted descriptions. From that point:
It would be nice to know that preparations are underway for stage 2. -- RexxS ( talk) 19:31, 23 March 2020 (UTC)
hastemplate:"short description" hastemplate:"disambiguation"
gives 190,996 results, so we're still missing some, but I get the point. We're probably safest to look at the size of
Category:Articles with short description, as that's likely to be the most conservative estimate. --
RexxS (
talk) 20:00, 23 March 2020 (UTC) You are invited to join the discussion at
Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_COVID-19#Short_descriptions_of_country/region_articles. {{u|
Sdkb}}
talk 06:43, 6 April 2020 (UTC)
Dab pages have a short description that can be customized. This is problematic for two reasons. The first one is that it is much longer than the recommended size of 40 characters. If follows that if a dab page appears in a list such as the "See also" section of another dab page, the use of {{ annotated link}} will provide an awful display. So, a short description reduced to, say "Disambiguation page" would be much better.
The second reason is that some dab pages disambiguate between pages that belong to the same category. For example, for Primitive polynomial, a better short description could be "Page providing links to two mathematical concepts with the same name". Here the word "mathematical" is essential, as a reader is not supposed to know that "polynomial" is a word specific to mathematics. I have no example under hand, but there are certainely dab pages that link only to mathematical articles, and whose name does not imply that only mathematics is involved. For an example (not a dab page) for which it is fundamental that "mathematics" appears in the short description, see Free module (if "mathematics" would be removed from the short description, a non mathematician could not imagine that this is about mathematics). D.Lazard ( talk) 11:10, 22 April 2020 (UTC)
Team, we're at 1.94 million articles. Great work so far, and probably only a mnonth or so more til we hit the magic 2 million. Keep going! Best, UnitedStatesian ( talk) 15:57, 17 May 2020 (UTC)
You are invited to join the discussion at
Wikipedia talk:Shortdesc helper#Capitalization for export feature. {{u|
Sdkb}}
talk 18:59, 7 July 2020 (UTC)
What description should I put for soft redirects? Is it the same as hard redirects?
Also feature request: Expand the width of the shortdesc helper automatically when the description gets too long
Also here's a category-ish: /info/en/?search=Special:LonelyPages AltoStev Talk 17:37, 11 July 2020 (UTC)
There is an RfC active proposing bot-importing short descriptions to and from Wikidata at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Synchronising short descriptions and Wikidata descriptions
Various options are proposed, including filling the gaps and overwriting existing content.
Cheers, · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 09:48, 7 August 2020 (UTC)
Hello,
I made an ad for WikiProject Short descriptions and was wondering if I should put it on the main project page? This is it:
Annoying animated image
|
---|
|
Regards, Giraffer ( munch) 08:52, 22 July 2020 (UTC)
As far as I can tell, we have about 32,000 pages in Category:Good articles (39,814), and about 18,000 of them are still missing short descriptions.
Of the 5,800 pages in Category:Featured articles (6,525), just under 2,000 articles are missing short descriptions.
In case anyone here is looking for something to work on. – Jonesey95 ( talk) 15:25, 9 July 2020 (UTC)
All Featured articles now Done.
MichaelMaggs (
talk) 21:15, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
Hi. I've noticed a few articles on my watchlist have recently had their short descriptions dramatically altered, in some cases making them almost as long as the text of the article itself. These changes raise potentially significant problems. For just two examples, consider the edits on Monarch butterfly ("Importing Wikidata short description: "Milkweed butterfly in the family Nymphalidae") and Persicaria perfoliata ("Changing short description from "Species of plant" to "Species of flowering plant in the knotweed family Polygonaceae"). Both of these descriptions include a taxonomic classification down to the level of family (not only that, they give both the common name of the family AND the scientific name), a rank which is notoriously unstable, and prone to constant rearrangement. These organisms could conceivably be in entirely different families a week from now, at the rate that new family-level classifications are being published for insects and flowering plants. As an example of this exact issue, consider the Mantis article; when it was created in 2005, there were 8 families in the order Mantodea. In 2019, the most recent revision, there were 29 families, and almost none of the members of the original 8 families are still in the families they were in back then. This has necessitated hundreds upon hundreds of edits, affecting nearly every article in WP that discusses any mantises, just to change the category links. It is quite possible that the next revision of Mantodea will remove some of those 29 families, create others, and for all any of us know it could be published tomorrow. The point I am trying to make is this: WP already has a massive hierarchy of categories that serve to organize articles by their classification, and even that is somewhat redundant given the nature of taxoboxes. It seems to me that the concept of the "Short Description" is not intended to be yet another redundant system of taxonomic classification, so I cannot quite understand why people believe that "short descriptions" going down to the level of family are a good idea, especially when organismal family ranks are NOT stable. I would argue, fairly strongly, that "Species of butterfly" is perfectly acceptable for the Monarch article, and "Species of flowering plant" is perfectly acceptable for the Persicaria article. Is there any chance that the people who are policy-makers in this WikiProject could devise and enforce a clearer policy regarding the over-specificity of taxonomic categories used in short descriptions? Dyanega ( talk) 21:58, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
A short description added by a bot should be added at the end of an article. This is somewhat counter-intuitive, so stay with me.
If a category of articles has an infobox, then the SD can generally be best created by the infobox from the data explicitly provided to the infobox.
The infobox sets the SD with the |noreplace
option so that it does not overwrite any explicit SD set at the top of the article.
If a bot is adding a SD to an article with an infobox that does not yet do this, then the SD should be below the infobox.
Thus when the infobox is later updated to set the SD, the SD added by the bot (also with the |noreplace
option) will not overwrite the infobox version, or the explicit version added at the top.
If the bot instead adds the SD at the top, then any subsequent SD from the infobox will be hidden.
Pause. Ponder. Discuss. — GhostInTheMachine talk to me 19:29, 20 August 2020 (UTC)
noreplace
option for short descriptions generated by templates, since those templates always appear below the top of the page. The noreplace
option tells the page renderer to ignore the template-generated SD if another SD is present on the page.|noreplace
is very unlikely to gain support. The original debate is at
phab:T193857 and you may find
User:Tgr's comments instructive. --
RexxS (
talk) 23:45, 20 August 2020 (UTC)
noreplace
may be the best we can do. –
Jonesey95 (
talk) 00:21, 21 August 2020 (UTC)
Has anyone explored the use of recurrent neural networks for auto-generating short descriptions? Since we have a training set of over 2 million, I think it should be possible to reasonably good descriptions using LSTM or GRU-based techniques. SD0001 ( talk) 16:45, 20 August 2020 (UTC)