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Following a request made on WP:US/R, a new script has been written ( User:SD0001/cat-all-shortdescs.js) using which you can see at a glance the short descriptions of all pages in a category (well, not all, but of the 200 which are in view at a time). SD0001 ( talk) 17:37, 21 August 2020 (UTC)
Pages in category "xxx"
header, towards right.
SD0001 (
talk)
10:01, 27 August 2020 (UTC)
"Uncaught ReferenceError: button is not defined
, which can be expanded to give 10 or so lines of detail the first of which reads
/info/en/?search=Category:World_Heritage_Sites_in_England line 11 _ injectedScript:1
. Then two GET errors relating to arrow-expanded.svg and arrow-collapsed-ltr.svg. Maybe here isn't the best place to discuss in detail, but I’m happy to help if you want more information or if you need some tests to be carried out. Let me know where the best place to discuss would be.
MichaelMaggs (
talk)
17:41, 29 August 2020 (UTC)I have made a list at Wikipedia:WikiProject Short descriptions#Tools, gadgets and scripts. You might want to polish up the descriptions a bit. · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 05:25, 27 August 2020 (UTC)
I have no personal experience doing short description imports, so I'm seeking opinions on this kind of high-speed importing done by Feloniii. Is this an indication of somebody just trying to rack up their edit count as quickly as possible, or is the process really mechanical enough that 5 imports in 25 seconds could be a reasonable use of the tool, exercising an appropriate level of diligence? -- RoySmith (talk) 17:39, 24 August 2020 (UTC)
When importing and browsing through short descriptions, I've come across some instances where, say, a town will have "Town in Los Angeles County, California, United States", whereas another might have "Town in Los Angeles County, California, U.S.", or just "Town in Los Angeles County, California". Is there a consensus on which of these is correct? I've seen a similar pattern with UK places. Sdkb ( talk) 17:15, 5 July 2019 (UTC)
Coming back to this a year later, to clarify the scope of my question, I'm wondering not just about place articles, but also e.g. "Building in Springfield, Oregon, United States", "Museum in Springfield, Oregon, United States of America", or "College in Oregon, United States". Not all of those instances are defined by an infobox, and not all of the infoboxes that do define are consistent. {{u| Sdkb}} talk 22:19, 12 September 2020 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
I see there's been some previous (and some recent) discussion about {{
annotated link}}
usage. From the template's doc page, I see there was agreement not to use this on disambiguation pages, but that doesn't go far enough – it needs to be deprecated from mainspace entirely. Mostly these are used in "See also" lists, but there are probably occasional other uses as well. As far as "See also"s go, if there's any text added, it should be to explain why this article is relevant, or how it relates to the article it's linked from. Short descriptions don't do this; they're merely for a very quick and dirty means of identifying a page. There are also other sorts of problems: inconsistency with formatting, length, purpose, etc.
I'm throwing this out here to get a sense if there's any major objection to this. But my hope going forward is a bot request (or maybe AWB run) to replace any uses of the template in mainspace, followed by a change to the template itself so that it displays an error if used in article space. – Deacon Vorbis ( carbon • videos) 14:57, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
subst:
(or even without if someone's reviewing manually and thinks it's inappropriate. –
Deacon Vorbis (
carbon •
videos)
17:14, 11 August 2020 (UTC)Editors should provide a brief annotation when a link's relevance is not immediately apparent, when the meaning of the term may not be generally known, or when the term is ambiguous. This is seldom done, and the annotated link template is a quick and easy way to add annotations. There is nothing stopping anyone from improving the annotations with local versions. An annotated link using the template is almost always more informative than nothing. The manual of style does not prescribe how annotations may be made, so this is currently at the editor's discretion. This proposal implies a rule removing that discretion, and a change to the manual of style. · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 05:27, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
inconsistency with formatting, length, purpose, etc., could you clarify this sufficiently to make your point?
it needs to be deprecated from mainspace entirelywithout specifying a reason. Please state your reasons.
{{
annotated link}}
should be deprecated from mainspace entirely because it's an inappropriate tool for the job it's being used for there. It's an inappropriate tool because short descriptions are meant to quickly identify articles, not to give any explanation of how it relates to other, unknown articles. Often, no description at all really is better than a useless description, because it rids visual clutter from the reader, and it's more of an encouragement to add something that might actually be useful.I have been told in Wikidata that my descriptions there don't follow their conventions (start lowercase). I was unaware that I was contributing there, but it seems that sometimes when I use the Wikipedia:Shortdesc helper to edit an en:wikipedia article, somehow my edit ends in Wikidata as well. It does not happen in other cases. What am I doing in the short desc helper that writes in Wikidata? Is the Edit and import? -- Error ( talk) 22:40, 12 September 2020 (UTC)
Adding a short description on Wikipedia does not do anything on Wikidata. I see that I also have been inadvertently adding short descriptions on Wikidata.
I have proposed that user:SD0001/shortdescs-in-category be made a gadget so that it can be found easily by more users. See Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#New gadget_proposal: view short descriptions in categories. Please comment there if you find this script useful. Thanks, – SD0001 ( talk) 05:07, 20 September 2020 (UTC)
Hi, I'm looking through a lot of short descriptions at the moment (importing to Wikidata where feasible and there isn't one there). Some odd ones are appearing, I'll highlight them in this thread if that's OK, hopefully someone here can help fix them.
(... more to come...) Thanks. Mike Peel ( talk) 08:00, 21 October 2020 (UTC)
Thanks. Mike Peel ( talk) 16:43, 21 October 2020 (UTC)
From /info/en/?search=Wikipedia:WikiProject_Short_descriptions#Editing_using_Shortdesc_helper_gadget
Adding a short description on Wikipedia does not do anything on Wikidata. To edit on Wikidata, click on one of the links (not shown in this example) in the Wikidata item description or Q-number to open the item at Wikidata.
This is not true, actually. Turns out that it Does affect Wikidata! I noticed this when a user reverted many of my edits that were on Wikidata: https://www.wikidata.org/?target=AltoStev&namespace=all&tagfilter=mw-reverted&start=&end=2020-10-16&limit=50&title=Special%3AContributions
Notice how all the edits show "Shortdesc helper". AltoStev Talk 22:06, 17 November 2020 (UTC)
Nearly six 3.7 million Wikipedia articles still don't have any short description, and they should. Someone populated the Wikidata texts using a fairly simple bot, and there's no reason why the Wikipedia community here couldn't do the same, but with more sophistication and focusing on Wikipedia's specific needs. There's already an active group of editors working on this WikiProject. With a suitable commitment from a skilled bot writer, I'm confident there would be enough eyes to ensure a high level both of reliablity and of usefulness for our purpose. It takes a huge amount of time to edit and check each new SD manually if the article has to be opened each time, but if a bot writer could provide draft texts in a table format for manual review before updating, the manual effort would be far less. I, and I'm sure several others, would be only too happy to help with the technical specifications of such a bot, though I'm not able to do the actual coding.
MichaelMaggs (
talk)
13:44, 7 August 2020 (UTC)
I propose a concerted effort to work though the 3.7 million Wikipedia articles that still don't have any short description, using bot-assistance on a category-by-category basis to reduce the number to a bare minimum of difficult cases that can only be handled manually. Start with the remaining larger and most structured categories to sweep up as much easy stuff as possible, adding more complex criteria as we build up experience. All subject to manual checks of at least a significant sample of the cases.
The proposal will need someone to write the code to generate the review tables, and to run an approved bot to update the articles themselves. Defining the trial criteria and SD definitions would need to be done separately for each top-level category, and more editors could provide input as that wouldn’t need such a high level of programming experience. I know enough Python myself, for example, to be able to run and edit a script, and could certainly help out with steps 3 to 5, especially if someone would be willing to provide assistance if I get stuck.
As a proof of concept, we might perhaps start with Category:English footballers, which has around 11,000 articles with no SD.
Proposed trial criteria:
is|was a|an [+ 0 to 5 words] English [+ 0 to 5 words] football
(Restricting the selection by wording in the lead is necessary, as the category is sometimes used for non-English players who play for an English club. Need to pick up eg "Was a former English professional football player").
Proposed SD definition:
Where [dates] means "(birthyear–deathyear)", where known, extracted from birth_date =
and death_date =
. If only one is known, then (b. birthyear) or (d. deathyear)
Comments would be welcome. Would be possible to seek bot approval for the overall concept, without having to submit the trial criteria each and evey time? Mike Peel, is this something you would be willing to help with? MichaelMaggs ( talk) 10:07, 8 August 2020 (UTC)
pageprops
contains the Wikidata description in the "Central description" field of [Page information] which the bot is already reading, so it should be immediately available unless I've missed something. --
RexxS (
talk)
19:27, 8 August 2020 (UTC)I tried to do this exact process about 2 years ago on articles about a species. The discussion can be found here. All it was in that case was simple regex to extract a chunk of the first sentence, do a little clean-up, and then apply a couple rules to see if the algorithm had likely botched it (too short, too long, etc). Ultimately we got it to the point where semi-automatic posting would've been fine, but fully automated posting would've been sketchy. Is it worth seeing if anything there is salvageable or if either of us did something unique and clever that can help the other one? Tazerdadog ( talk) 22:43, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
As Mike Peel has very kindly offered to write a script, we need to decide exactly what the requirements are. The script should be able to handle both bot and user-assist running. Bot operation will be needed if we are to make serious inroads into the remaining easy/structured cases in a reasonable time, and the ability to run as an assistive script as well will allow much faster manual editing than is possible with the existing gadget. Mike has said that he can't offer a complex user interface, which is fine. I would think that a simple Python file that anyone can run locally would be quite workable. The output/input mechanism needn't be pretty as long as it is accessible to anyone who knows how to run Python. Here's what I suggest; we should discuss before actually asking Mike to implement it
A Python script, based on the one already written, with the following enhancements:
is|was a|an [+ 0 to 5 words] English [+ 0 to 5 words] football
This is probably getting into too much detail for editors to comment on before seeing some actual outputs. But, Mike Peel, if you're still willing to implement this I'd be happy to do some test runs and work up a variety of specific scripting proposals that I could then seek consensus and bot approval for. MichaelMaggs ( talk) 21:16, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
@
MichaelMaggs: Mostly this seems OK. For performance reasons I think it would be best to only do two passes through the category, one to prepare the short descriptions and statistics, and the other to implement them. I've been trying to think of a good way to run this that keeps users in control without them having to run the python code and do bot approval themselves, but avoiding having to develop a complex user interface. My thoughts are currently:
1. Have an approved user list on a protected page (so we can control who has access), like:
2. Have a run script page that the bot would keep an eye on (checking say once per hour) with a table like this one. We can define some standard formats like %BORNDIED%. Start/end could be the first letters of the articles, they might need to be more than the first letter if articles aren't ordered alphabetically. Going through subcategories could be an option, but would need a strict limit on how many levels to go into, perhaps just 1 level? And perhaps a maximum number to do at once (10k?).
Category | Username | SD definition | Must include | First sentence must include | Start | End | Maximum number | Holding page | Status |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Category:English footballers | User:MichaelMaggs | English footballer (%BORNDIED%) | nfobox | English football |
A | B | 1000 | User:Mike Peel/shortdesc | Ready/In progress/Done |
3. If the editor is an approved one, then the bot could do part 1 to prepare the short descriptions and to post them to the holding page as a table like:
Article | New short description | Wikidata | Lead sentence |
---|---|---|---|
Ben Abbey | English footballer (b. 1978) | English footballer (born 1978) | Benjamin Charles Abbey (born 13 May 1978) is an English former footballer. |
4. The editor could then change/remove these short descriptions as they want, and then add something like
Category:Ready for Pi bot when they are done. (I would like to add an requirement that the modified descriptions would be CC-0 so they can be written back to Wikidata as well if there's not a description there already.)
5. Pi bot would then load the holding page and implement the entries under "New short description" (probably double-checking that the article is still in the category to avoid it being used to batch-set short descriptions for other article selections), then move the page to a category like
Category:Done by Pi bot. Bot edits here are normally 1 every 10 seconds = 8640/day, so if fully loaded then we could get through all remaining articles in a year or so.
Perhaps this goes too far, particularly given that getting bot consensus in this area would be tricky. In which case I'm happy to go back to the original downloadable python script case. What do you think? Thanks.
Mike Peel (
talk)
17:06, 20 August 2020 (UTC)
Have just been reminded that I ought to get back to this project. MichaelMaggs ( talk) 09:24, 18 November 2020 (UTC)
If we want to post short descriptions using a script in a fully automated way (i.e. without a human manually checking each description), we need to decide at least roughly what an acceptable error rate looks like. It's worth noting that it is much harder to hit the error rate as it goes down. It's trivially easy to write something that makes an acceptable short description 90% of the time. 99% is hard, but might be doable with a lot of work on specific categories. 99.9% is going to be impossible for all but the most tightly formulaic articles. Error rate should be determined by a reasonable human looking at the short descriptions and making a judgement call.
For context, PearBOT, which operated on BLPs, had an error rate that seemed to be in the realm of 1%, and was approved. (none of the errors were BLP violations, they were grammar errors). My Species shortdescription generator has an error rate of about 5%. It generates much more descriptive short descriptions than Pear's (which were of the form [Nationality][Occupation]). It also skips far fewer articles than Pear's (Pear skipped 80%, I skipped 20%). I also put relatively little time into the algorithm, (~10 hours), and it's still pretty crude. I'd personally set the line for fully-automatic posting at 3%, but that's a judgement call, and I'd be interested in hearing numbers from other people below. Tazerdadog ( talk) 03:04, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
I have made a proposal to improve consistency in the way dates are used within short descriptions. Please contribute here. MichaelMaggs ( talk) 16:12, 30 November 2020 (UTC)
Whenever I click the
random article button to find a page that may need a short description, there's a pretty decent chance I end up at one of the gazillion moth species articles that exist here (most recently
Mesocolpia dexiphyma). The short description for all of these should be "Species of moth", in my view, and getting that to happen automatically would produce a huge bump in the progress bar of the project. Most of these pages have the template {{
Speciesbox}}, so that would be the template to generate it from. It uses the scientific names, though, so deriving "moth" from it (or, more challengingly if we want to apply this more broadly, deriving common names from scientific names) might be a challenge. Thoughts? (please use {{
ping|Sdkb}}
on reply) {{u|
Sdkb}}
talk
01:16, 18 November 2020 (UTC)
Hi User:Sdkb, you might like to have a look at the moth-related section below, and let me know what you think. MichaelMaggs ( talk) 19:05, 7 December 2020 (UTC)
In this section above I suggested creating a bot to make serious headway in adding short descriptions to the several million articles that still don’t have one. User:Mike Peel kindly wrote some code to get me started with my first bot, and I’m now ready to go with ShortDescBot. The English footballers category was to be the initial task, but as someone has since completed that with AWB I’m proposing to start with the 26,000 or so moth articles that still lack a short description. The moths seem a good place to start since suitably-precise short descriptions can’t trivially be generated from existing inboxes (even for articles where one exists), at least without expensive Lua calls. No changes will be made to any existing short description.
The aim is to keep the new descriptions simple so that they can be added to many articles quickly, while still maintaining a low error rate. It’s always possible to hand-craft more sophisticated text, but with so many articles still to do we should I think be aiming for ‘decent’ rather than ‘perfect’ at this stage.
The procedure is, on a category-by-category basis:
The moth articles are well structured, and it’s possible to identify “Species of moth” and “Genus of moths” with near 100% accuracy. You can see a sample of 200 or so proposed edits from Category:Moths of the United States at User:MichaelMaggs/Moths; note that the bot correctly identifies several articles as genus which Wikidata wrongly has as species. Of the 837 target articles in that category, the bot is able to fix over 98%, with just a few being skipped where it wasn't quite able to extract the first sentence of the lead.
The moths will be the first task for ShortDescBot. Assuming that’s successful I’ll then come back here to discuss future options, the next probably being a wider range of species and genus articles. WP:BAG approval will be needed for the task, and as BAG editors look for evidence of community consensus, it would be helpful to get some support in the comments below! Happy to take questions, too. Many thanks, MichaelMaggs ( talk) 19:01, 7 December 2020 (UTC)
You are invited to join the discussion at
Template talk:Infobox song § Automatic short descriptions. {{u|
Sdkb}}
talk
07:11, 20 December 2020 (UTC)
I'd like to be able to go through any remaining Vital Articles that do not yet have a short description to add one. Is there any script that could be used for this purpose? (please ping me if you reply) {{u| Sdkb}} talk 19:34, 15 April 2020 (UTC)
How do I find a list of all articles without a short description?
-incategory:"Articles with short description"
—
GhostInTheMachine
talk to me
23:02, 5 January 2021 (UTC)@ GhostInTheMachine: - Even using your link, I am still only seeing articles with a short description. It is listed at 3.6 million with that specific link as well, if that helps. Most likely something on my end. - UnguidedEmperor
@ GhostInTheMachine: Done, at this moment it shows Driveshaft, however this changes once I refresh the page, on 2-3 refreshes it now shows Point guard. - UnguidedEmperor
@ GhostInTheMachine: - Oh, that explains it, sorry. So in what cases should I import the short-description from Wikidata? Or maybe perhaps you could link me somewhere explaining this. Thanks for the help again. - UnguidedEmperor
I just noticed Loyola Academy is in Category:Articles with long short description even though its SD is short. I don't see any recent changes to the SD. This article has a infobox-generated long SD that has been overridden with a local SD. I'm guessing the category is added by the infobox template even though the local SD is the one that "counts". MB 15:53, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
Private, catholic, non-profit coeducational secondary (grades 9-12) education institution school in Laramie Avenue Wilmette, Illinois, United States— 148 characters
Catholic college prep school in Illinois, U.S.— 46 characters
{{short description
within the article wiki-text, or nothing if not found.These are typical results from the template
{{Has short description |title=Loyola Academy}}
→ 1{{Has short description |title=Rock Bridge High School}}
→short description not firstcats. I will try it in the SD sandbox — GhostInTheMachine talk to me 22:54, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
The following two articles came up in my petscan search results as not having descriptions Concordat of Worms and Public_international_law, but one redirects to a specific "anchor" section in the article, so I checked the main article descriptions as well as the redirect pages, and all of them had descriptions, so why did these two items show up in the search results as having no descriptions? How do we solve this? Huggums537 ( talk) 11:23, 5 February 2021 (UTC)
Wow, I was worried for nothing. I was thinking there would be way more "problems" to deal with, and I thought there would be others besides the two I already found, but it appears I "got lucky" and accidentally found the only two there were. Well, at least I still have a huge pool of descriptions to work on. Thanks. Huggums537 ( talk) 22:43, 5 February 2021 (UTC)
I have seen a small number of articles where the SD template has a leading space {{ short description...
– and in one case 2 spaces. In theory this is OK for the template itself, but the
Shortdesc helper gadget does not recognise this as a SD template. In a couple of cases, this led to somebody adding a second SD via the gadget. I have fixed all cases of this, added it to my regular checks and posted a change request. —
GhostInTheMachine
talk to me
15:17, 6 February 2021 (UTC)
It seems that the SD on list articles are all set to "Wikimedia list article" in WD. Any guidance on this? The title is usually self-explanatory (e.g. List of hotels in Chicago). Should we just import this, change it to "Wikipedia list article", or something else? MB 04:58, 28 April 2020 (UTC)
ShortDescBot task 2 is ready to start work on organism articles, as discussed above, and is awaiting approval for the task. Where the bot writes a short description for an article on a genus which is monotypic (that is, where the genus contains only a single species), it currently phrases it (for example) "Single-species genus of butterflies". I chose that in preference to "Monotypic genus of butterflies" as the word "monotypic" is I suspect largely unknown except to biologists, and doesn't comply with WP:HOWTOSD which recommends "simple, readily comprehensible terms that do not require pre-existing detailed knowledge of the subject." "Single-species" is, I believe, both comprehensible to the majority of readers and is also accurate.
But on Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/ShortDescBot 2 Mr Fink, who has some specialist knowledge, has indicated his preference for 'Monotypic'. I have no problem switching to that if there is consensus to do so, but would like to know what others think of the importance or otherwise of sticking to comprehensible terms. If there's no consensus, or no particular interest, I'll simply drop the idea of flagging that type of genus article, and stick with "Genus of butterflies". MichaelMaggs ( talk) 17:20, 7 February 2021 (UTC)
This could use some more opinions. Pinging editors who’ve shown an interest, from this section. @ Jonesey95, Dyanega, GhostInTheMachine, Pbsouthwood, and Certes: It's this very specific question I need feedback on: in the context of a short description for a genus, should the bot use “Single-species” or “Monotypic” for the relevant articles? So far I see no consensus which means I won't be using either. MichaelMaggs ( talk) 12:04, 10 February 2021 (UTC)
Genus of butterfliesis fine. Is
Genus of butterflymore correct? Perhaps
Genus of carnivorous butterfly, if that is one of their distinguishing features.
Single-species ...(or
Monotypic ...) does not really help the reader if they were looking for a rock band — GhostInTheMachine talk to me 17:23, 10 February 2021 (UTC)
Thanks all, those comments are really useful. I find the arguments against using both "Single-species" and "Monotypic" persuasive, and I'll change the bot so that it doesn't make use of either. MichaelMaggs ( talk) 09:34, 12 February 2021 (UTC)
What are we doing now for articles that don't really need a SD. For example, I don't see that a SD for
Alpine skiing at the 1960 Winter Olympics – Men's downhill would be helpful in anyway. I recall something that acknowledged there are cases like this.
Wikipedia:Short description says "Most mainspace articles should have a short description." but does not mention exceptions. Should this article have {{
Short description|none}}
?
MB
16:20, 7 February 2021 (UTC)
|none
rather than |None
then. That's OK.
MichaelMaggs (
talk)
19:57, 7 February 2021 (UTC)
What about the SD helper tool. Should it display something to indicate no SD has been explicitly selected? On
Desiigner discography, it offers to import from WD while on
Alpine skiing at the 1960 Winter Olympics – Men's downhill is says "missing". In both cases, there is a local {{
Short description|none}}
.
MB
16:56, 17 February 2021 (UTC)
What is the status of {{short description|none}}
? The gadget does not see this as an article having a valid SD and offers to import a SD from Wikidata —
GhostInTheMachine
talk to me
15:25, 6 February 2021 (UTC)
{{short description|none}}
. Search on hastemplate:"short description" insource:"{{short description|none}}"
.{{short description|Wikipedia list article}}
and {{short description|none}}
, so I removed the 'Wikipedia list article' one. Then the Page information showed the Central (i.e. Wikidata) description as 'Wikimedia list article', but the Local description had disappeared. Doing a mobile search for list of countries by h
offered
List of countries by Human Development Index with no short description.|none
leaving just {{short description}}
. That gave the same result for the Page information and the mobile search, showing that a blank SD and SD=none are equivalent.{{short description|none}}
to indicate it is intended to be blank, with the same result. We are now in a position to remove {{short description|Wikipedia list article}}
(or Wikimedia list article
once the SD helper is fixed to accept blank SDs or SD=none (so that eager editors don't continually re-add the redundant descriptions from Wikidata). --
RexxS (
talk)
19:08, 6 February 2021 (UTC)
{{short description|None}}
be better than {{short description|none}}
, given the guidance that SDs should start with a capital letter? I'm happy to update the instructions in various places once I know what's been agreed. See also the query below.
MichaelMaggs (
talk)
16:46, 7 February 2021 (UTC)
|none
, then the template needs no modification.|None
, then change the template and change the 358 articles that use "none".Should we change the guidance to reflect a new way of thinking about improving descriptions now that we have met our "quota" and the wikidata has been turned off for mobile?
Follow the discussion here: Wikipedia_talk:Short_description#"Duplicate_information" Huggums537 ( talk) 10:37, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
The red/green state of the project bar shows the project as currently 47.797% complete, but I think that may be a significant underestimate. If I understand the calculation correctly, the red part of the bar includes all articles (except disambiguations), and in particular it includes redirects. Since very few if any redirects need a short description, they ought to be excluded as well. Is there a way with a magic word or lua module to count how many there are and remove them? As there are so many it could make a big difference to our progress indicator. MichaelMaggs ( talk) 22:26, 3 March 2021 (UTC)
Going off at a tangent: should redirects ever have short descriptions? Should they be removed either selectively or wholesale? Should Shortdesc helper advise editors to go away when they try to add them? Certes ( talk) 00:28, 4 March 2021 (UTC)
At 06:10 UTC on 18 March 2021, the English Wikipedia officially crossed the 50 percent threshold on short descriptions, with 2,975,796 written descriptions! Sammi Brie (she/her • t • c) 06:11, 18 March 2021 (UTC)
ShortDescBot has successfully completed its addition of new short descriptions to all the moth articles. Next, I want to move on to categories of other organisms. This is a good bot task since non-technical short descriptions complying with WP:HOWTOSD can’t automatically be generated from the usual infoboxes, at least without expensive Lua calls. There are around 210,000 target articles.
Each bot run is based on a single category at some level in the tree that I can manually associate with a suitable common generic name. Sometimes that may be the same as the category name (Category:Butterflies --> "butterfly"), but often not (Category:Poaceae --> "grass" or Category:Onychophorans --> "velvet worm"). The bot then constructs and adds new short descriptions such as "Species of butterfly", "Genus of velvet worms", "Family of grasses" and so on. The text is deliberately simple so that a low error rate (<1%) can be maintained while minimising the number of non-standard articles that the bot has to skip as 'too difficult to parse'. For each category the procedure is:
The bot won't change existing short descriptions, with one small exception. A new feature this time is the inclusion of "Extinct ..." in the bot-created description of extinct organism articles, and also "Single-species .." in
Monotypic genus articles (where that can be done without making the text too long). 1300 2000 or so of the moth short descriptions that the bot created last time can be improved.
You can see a sample of suggested edits from a variety of categories at User:MichaelMaggs/ShortDesc.
Feedback would be useful, please, before I apply for bot approval. MichaelMaggs ( talk) 13:52, 18 January 2021 (UTC)
I've looked at the source code, but I'm not sure I'm understanding it correctly. You want to: a) identify that an article is about an organism; b) determine the rank (genus/species/etc.); c) determine a generic common name; d) determine monotypy or extinction if applicable. I gather a) is accomplished by presence of one of the taxobox template, b) and d) are parsed from the lead sentence, and c) comes from membership in a particular category. Am I understanding correctly? Plantdrew ( talk) 23:55, 19 January 2021 (UTC)
Done All done, so far as I can tell, but the category structure is so complicated that I may well have missed some categories. Feel free to let me know on my talk page if you come across any missing organism categories that are amenable to bot-generated descriptions and which are too large to handle manually.
MichaelMaggs (
talk)
17:31, 8 April 2021 (UTC)
Not sure how many users are still active around here, but I'd just like to draw attention to this category Category:Articles with long short description. There's many thousands of articles with too long short descriptions, which will need to be fixed at some point. This also can't be done by any bot, so any effort that you can give would be great. I'll try and give it a go when I have time. Regards, Willbb234 Talk (please {{ ping}} me in replies) 23:45, 27 February 2021 (UTC)
Trialpears, MichaelMaggs I attempted to change the SD of I SS Panzer Corps but the original SD remained and I had to go into the wikitext to remove it. This is likely an error on the part of the Shortdesc helper but it could be to do with the SD being too long or was formatted incorrectly ( the diff). Another point is the category mentioned above seems to have some false-positives in it. See 460th Space Wing, Lock and Dam No. 25, and Lock and Dam No. 22 which all have short SDs but still appear in the category. Kind regards, Talk (please {{ ping}} me in replies) 22:51, 26 March 2021 (UTC)
Infobox | Transclusions | Suggested short description, based on WP:HOWTOSD | Status | ||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Template:Chembox | 11988 | Chemical compound | ![]() | ||
Template:Infobox award | 10425 | Award | ![]() | ||
Template:Infobox book | 46515 | [year] book by [author] | Auto short description possible: not yet done | ||
Template:Infobox character | 7462 | Fictional character by [author] | Auto short description possible: not yet done | ||
Template:Infobox film | 144829 | [year] film by [director] | Auto short description possible: not yet done | ||
Template:Infobox medical condition | 8971 | Medical condition | ![]() | ||
Template:Infobox drug | 77377 | Drug | ![]() | ||
Template:Infobox body of water | 16676 | Body of water in [country] | Auto short description possible: not yet done | ||
Template:Infobox mountain | 25657 | Mountain in [country] | Auto short description possible: not yet done | ||
Template:Infobox river | 27682 | River in [country] | Discussion started | ||
Template:Infobox company | 77502 | Company in [country] | Auto short description possible: not yet done | ||
Template:Infobox university | 25758 | University in [country] | Discussion started | ||
Template:Infobox military conflict | 18680 | Military conflict [(dates)] | ![]() | ||
Template:Infobox military unit | 23693 | Military unit | Discussion started | ||
Template:Infobox organization | 29468 | Organization in [country] | Auto short description possible: not yet done | ||
Template:Infobox airport | 15480 | Airport in [country] | Auto short description possible: not yet done | ||
Template:Infobox road | 23546 | Road in [country] | ![]() | ||
Template:Infobox station | 50793 | Station in [country] | Auto short description possible: not yet done | ||
Template:Infobox football club | 24683 | Football club in [country] | Auto short description possible: not yet done |
There are many infoboxes that still don't, but probably could, fill in missing short descriptions automatically. Here's a list of possibilities that have fairly heavy usage (though I don't know how many instances of each already have a manual description). There are other templates of course, but not all lend themselves to the creation of a simple SD. I'm happy for the table to be corrected/amended and used as a working document, if that would be helpful. MichaelMaggs ( talk) 12:09, 29 March 2021 (UTC)
Please see: Template talk:Disambiguation page short description#Short?. — Goszei ( talk) 04:40, 3 April 2021 (UTC)
For section "Auto-generated from infoboxes and other templates" wondering if "Infobox sports season" can be added as Done? Noticed within Category:Manitoba Junior Hockey League seasons that at 2007 and going forward, the auto-gen seems to be working. I'm new to this WP so not sure if explaining clearly. JoeNMLC ( talk) 21:06, 12 April 2021 (UTC)
The tracking category
Category:Articles with long short description still seems to include articles that should not be there, which makes it hard to work through sytemematically. The very first article,
1 Train (song), is included even though the manual template {{Short description|2013 song by ASAP Rocky}}
was added to it on 26 March, presumably to overrride the default description from {{
Infobox song}}. Not sure what needs to be done to fix this.
MichaelMaggs (
talk)
12:27, 18 April 2021 (UTC)
2013 song by ASAP Rocky featuring Kendrick Lamar, Joey Badass, Yelawolf, Danny Brown, Action Bronson and Big K.R.I.T.from the infobox and
2013 song by ASAP Rockyfrom the local SD template. The infobox SD template adds the article to the category — GhostInTheMachine talk to me 13:02, 18 April 2021 (UTC)
|short_description=
as a field in the infobox, which then prevents the infobox from even creating the default one. --
Gonnym (
talk)
13:04, 18 April 2021 (UTC)
{{
infobox school}}
. This should be added to all infoboxes that generate SDs.
MB
15:53, 18 April 2021 (UTC)
Good news! PearBOT 5 recently finished its 100 thousand+ edit long run of adding short descriptions to biographies based on the first sentence in the lead. There is however more potential for this generation method and by loosening on some restrictions in the first run, such as going from always requiring the first word of the description being a nationality to only requiring that a nationality is present and allowing it to add descriptions to politicians articles which wasn't done before due to it not being able to with 100% confidence figure out their term. Now it gives them a description without any dates. There are also a few more possible cut off points which makes more descriptions fall under the 40 character limit and generates more descriptions. Here we have 300ish descriptions generated by the new bot. The plan is to start this run next weekend if no issues arise. There is also a thread at Wikipedia:Bots/Noticeboard#Second run. -- Trialpears ( talk) 20:09, 25 April 2021 (UTC)
Albert I of Belgium is in Category:Short description matches Wikidata and in Category:Short description is different from Wikidata. In fact, according to Petscan, we have no less than 33,706 articles with this situation. Fram ( talk) 11:07, 28 April 2021 (UTC)
Third King of the Belgiansfrom the local template and
King of the Belgiansfrom the infobox. The local one is the "live" one and it matches Wikidata — GhostInTheMachine talk to me 11:45, 28 April 2021 (UTC)
{{{noreplace}}}
is for —
GhostInTheMachine
talk to me
15:48, 28 April 2021 (UTC)deploy? — GhostInTheMachine talk to me 15:45, 28 April 2021 (UTC)
{{Infobox short descripion}}
that is designed to only function within an infobox and takes a list of several alternative candidate short descriptions generated by the infobox code. The infobox can then start with the original full size text and fail gracefully to progressively simpler versions. The template then emits the first of these that is "short enough", perhaps with the final option being no text at all. BTW – Starting a template name with templateseems slightly evil to me. — GhostInTheMachine talk to me 20:53, 28 April 2021 (UTC)
Wikipedia desktop searches are now being enhanced with a short description under each title in the drop-down list. Did that happen very recently? I could have sworn those short descriptions weren't there a few days ago. MichaelMaggs ( talk) 20:56, 28 April 2021 (UTC)
I've just stumbled across for the first time a See also section that makes use of {{ annotated link}}: see Christmas#See_also. It looks very good. MichaelMaggs ( talk) 15:24, 15 May 2021 (UTC)
I propose that Wikipedia talk:Short description be merged to here. These pages are both for discussion of short descriptions and should be consolidated. {{u| Sdkb}} talk 19:56, 23 May 2021 (UTC)
There seems to be consensus to merge this talk page into Wikipedia talk:Short description. I'd be happy to do it, but would like to check the procedure. Would it work to (1) archive all discussions on this page, then (2) turn this page into a redirect? What should happen to the archives? Should they be left where they are, with a note on Wikipedia talk:Short description pointing out where they can be found? MichaelMaggs ( talk) 15:47, 20 September 2021 (UTC)
When using the "none" option on an article, the "Missing page description" warning still shows at the top of the article. Shouldn't this be suppressed to avoid confusion? - X201 ( talk) 07:32, 24 May 2021 (UTC)
The article
Sodium sulfate has a short description of Chemical compound with formula Na<sub>2</sub>SO<sub>4</sub>
.
The view of an editor was that simple formatting HTML tags would be acceptable as they display correctly.
Currently,
WP:SDFORMAT says Each short description should ... be written in plain text – without HTML tags or Wiki markup
.
I assume it is correct that short descriptions should not contain wiki markup (especially links and templates), but what about simple HTML tags?
written in plain text – without HTML tags or Wiki markupmeans that "simple" HTML tags are not acceptable. JBchrch talk 18:40, 22 June 2021 (UTC)
Na₂SO₄
-> Na₂SO₄ //
Lollipoplollipoplollipop::
talk
02:34, 23 June 2021 (UTC)Why does Netherlands in the Junior Eurovision Song Contest 2015 have "Musical artist" as the short description? Thanks. Mike Peel ( talk) 18:56, 4 July 2021 (UTC)
There is edit-warring over description, which is nearly identical to the article's title. More at Wikipedia talk:Short description#Description repeating article's title. -- Triggerhippie4 ( talk) 21:30, 28 July 2021 (UTC)
Reached as of this timestamp with 3,620,088 pages. Sammi Brie (she/her • t • c) 04:23, 22 August 2021 (UTC)
On this page I am repeatedly running into an issue where a short description is entered, and the page reports Wikimedia template. Any effort to correct this fails. How do we sort this and get the correct short desc into the page? (should be "Asian rice dish") -- Whiteguru ( talk) 05:43, 7 September 2021 (UTC)
Hi, I've been writing an automatic short description for this template (see the talk page). Could someone experienced in writing automatic short descriptions check to see if I've made any mistakes? Thanks! ― Qwerfjkl talk 19:59, 19 September 2021 (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 |
Following a request made on WP:US/R, a new script has been written ( User:SD0001/cat-all-shortdescs.js) using which you can see at a glance the short descriptions of all pages in a category (well, not all, but of the 200 which are in view at a time). SD0001 ( talk) 17:37, 21 August 2020 (UTC)
Pages in category "xxx"
header, towards right.
SD0001 (
talk)
10:01, 27 August 2020 (UTC)
"Uncaught ReferenceError: button is not defined
, which can be expanded to give 10 or so lines of detail the first of which reads
/info/en/?search=Category:World_Heritage_Sites_in_England line 11 _ injectedScript:1
. Then two GET errors relating to arrow-expanded.svg and arrow-collapsed-ltr.svg. Maybe here isn't the best place to discuss in detail, but I’m happy to help if you want more information or if you need some tests to be carried out. Let me know where the best place to discuss would be.
MichaelMaggs (
talk)
17:41, 29 August 2020 (UTC)I have made a list at Wikipedia:WikiProject Short descriptions#Tools, gadgets and scripts. You might want to polish up the descriptions a bit. · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 05:25, 27 August 2020 (UTC)
I have no personal experience doing short description imports, so I'm seeking opinions on this kind of high-speed importing done by Feloniii. Is this an indication of somebody just trying to rack up their edit count as quickly as possible, or is the process really mechanical enough that 5 imports in 25 seconds could be a reasonable use of the tool, exercising an appropriate level of diligence? -- RoySmith (talk) 17:39, 24 August 2020 (UTC)
When importing and browsing through short descriptions, I've come across some instances where, say, a town will have "Town in Los Angeles County, California, United States", whereas another might have "Town in Los Angeles County, California, U.S.", or just "Town in Los Angeles County, California". Is there a consensus on which of these is correct? I've seen a similar pattern with UK places. Sdkb ( talk) 17:15, 5 July 2019 (UTC)
Coming back to this a year later, to clarify the scope of my question, I'm wondering not just about place articles, but also e.g. "Building in Springfield, Oregon, United States", "Museum in Springfield, Oregon, United States of America", or "College in Oregon, United States". Not all of those instances are defined by an infobox, and not all of the infoboxes that do define are consistent. {{u| Sdkb}} talk 22:19, 12 September 2020 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
I see there's been some previous (and some recent) discussion about {{
annotated link}}
usage. From the template's doc page, I see there was agreement not to use this on disambiguation pages, but that doesn't go far enough – it needs to be deprecated from mainspace entirely. Mostly these are used in "See also" lists, but there are probably occasional other uses as well. As far as "See also"s go, if there's any text added, it should be to explain why this article is relevant, or how it relates to the article it's linked from. Short descriptions don't do this; they're merely for a very quick and dirty means of identifying a page. There are also other sorts of problems: inconsistency with formatting, length, purpose, etc.
I'm throwing this out here to get a sense if there's any major objection to this. But my hope going forward is a bot request (or maybe AWB run) to replace any uses of the template in mainspace, followed by a change to the template itself so that it displays an error if used in article space. – Deacon Vorbis ( carbon • videos) 14:57, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
subst:
(or even without if someone's reviewing manually and thinks it's inappropriate. –
Deacon Vorbis (
carbon •
videos)
17:14, 11 August 2020 (UTC)Editors should provide a brief annotation when a link's relevance is not immediately apparent, when the meaning of the term may not be generally known, or when the term is ambiguous. This is seldom done, and the annotated link template is a quick and easy way to add annotations. There is nothing stopping anyone from improving the annotations with local versions. An annotated link using the template is almost always more informative than nothing. The manual of style does not prescribe how annotations may be made, so this is currently at the editor's discretion. This proposal implies a rule removing that discretion, and a change to the manual of style. · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 05:27, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
inconsistency with formatting, length, purpose, etc., could you clarify this sufficiently to make your point?
it needs to be deprecated from mainspace entirelywithout specifying a reason. Please state your reasons.
{{
annotated link}}
should be deprecated from mainspace entirely because it's an inappropriate tool for the job it's being used for there. It's an inappropriate tool because short descriptions are meant to quickly identify articles, not to give any explanation of how it relates to other, unknown articles. Often, no description at all really is better than a useless description, because it rids visual clutter from the reader, and it's more of an encouragement to add something that might actually be useful.I have been told in Wikidata that my descriptions there don't follow their conventions (start lowercase). I was unaware that I was contributing there, but it seems that sometimes when I use the Wikipedia:Shortdesc helper to edit an en:wikipedia article, somehow my edit ends in Wikidata as well. It does not happen in other cases. What am I doing in the short desc helper that writes in Wikidata? Is the Edit and import? -- Error ( talk) 22:40, 12 September 2020 (UTC)
Adding a short description on Wikipedia does not do anything on Wikidata. I see that I also have been inadvertently adding short descriptions on Wikidata.
I have proposed that user:SD0001/shortdescs-in-category be made a gadget so that it can be found easily by more users. See Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#New gadget_proposal: view short descriptions in categories. Please comment there if you find this script useful. Thanks, – SD0001 ( talk) 05:07, 20 September 2020 (UTC)
Hi, I'm looking through a lot of short descriptions at the moment (importing to Wikidata where feasible and there isn't one there). Some odd ones are appearing, I'll highlight them in this thread if that's OK, hopefully someone here can help fix them.
(... more to come...) Thanks. Mike Peel ( talk) 08:00, 21 October 2020 (UTC)
Thanks. Mike Peel ( talk) 16:43, 21 October 2020 (UTC)
From /info/en/?search=Wikipedia:WikiProject_Short_descriptions#Editing_using_Shortdesc_helper_gadget
Adding a short description on Wikipedia does not do anything on Wikidata. To edit on Wikidata, click on one of the links (not shown in this example) in the Wikidata item description or Q-number to open the item at Wikidata.
This is not true, actually. Turns out that it Does affect Wikidata! I noticed this when a user reverted many of my edits that were on Wikidata: https://www.wikidata.org/?target=AltoStev&namespace=all&tagfilter=mw-reverted&start=&end=2020-10-16&limit=50&title=Special%3AContributions
Notice how all the edits show "Shortdesc helper". AltoStev Talk 22:06, 17 November 2020 (UTC)
Nearly six 3.7 million Wikipedia articles still don't have any short description, and they should. Someone populated the Wikidata texts using a fairly simple bot, and there's no reason why the Wikipedia community here couldn't do the same, but with more sophistication and focusing on Wikipedia's specific needs. There's already an active group of editors working on this WikiProject. With a suitable commitment from a skilled bot writer, I'm confident there would be enough eyes to ensure a high level both of reliablity and of usefulness for our purpose. It takes a huge amount of time to edit and check each new SD manually if the article has to be opened each time, but if a bot writer could provide draft texts in a table format for manual review before updating, the manual effort would be far less. I, and I'm sure several others, would be only too happy to help with the technical specifications of such a bot, though I'm not able to do the actual coding.
MichaelMaggs (
talk)
13:44, 7 August 2020 (UTC)
I propose a concerted effort to work though the 3.7 million Wikipedia articles that still don't have any short description, using bot-assistance on a category-by-category basis to reduce the number to a bare minimum of difficult cases that can only be handled manually. Start with the remaining larger and most structured categories to sweep up as much easy stuff as possible, adding more complex criteria as we build up experience. All subject to manual checks of at least a significant sample of the cases.
The proposal will need someone to write the code to generate the review tables, and to run an approved bot to update the articles themselves. Defining the trial criteria and SD definitions would need to be done separately for each top-level category, and more editors could provide input as that wouldn’t need such a high level of programming experience. I know enough Python myself, for example, to be able to run and edit a script, and could certainly help out with steps 3 to 5, especially if someone would be willing to provide assistance if I get stuck.
As a proof of concept, we might perhaps start with Category:English footballers, which has around 11,000 articles with no SD.
Proposed trial criteria:
is|was a|an [+ 0 to 5 words] English [+ 0 to 5 words] football
(Restricting the selection by wording in the lead is necessary, as the category is sometimes used for non-English players who play for an English club. Need to pick up eg "Was a former English professional football player").
Proposed SD definition:
Where [dates] means "(birthyear–deathyear)", where known, extracted from birth_date =
and death_date =
. If only one is known, then (b. birthyear) or (d. deathyear)
Comments would be welcome. Would be possible to seek bot approval for the overall concept, without having to submit the trial criteria each and evey time? Mike Peel, is this something you would be willing to help with? MichaelMaggs ( talk) 10:07, 8 August 2020 (UTC)
pageprops
contains the Wikidata description in the "Central description" field of [Page information] which the bot is already reading, so it should be immediately available unless I've missed something. --
RexxS (
talk)
19:27, 8 August 2020 (UTC)I tried to do this exact process about 2 years ago on articles about a species. The discussion can be found here. All it was in that case was simple regex to extract a chunk of the first sentence, do a little clean-up, and then apply a couple rules to see if the algorithm had likely botched it (too short, too long, etc). Ultimately we got it to the point where semi-automatic posting would've been fine, but fully automated posting would've been sketchy. Is it worth seeing if anything there is salvageable or if either of us did something unique and clever that can help the other one? Tazerdadog ( talk) 22:43, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
As Mike Peel has very kindly offered to write a script, we need to decide exactly what the requirements are. The script should be able to handle both bot and user-assist running. Bot operation will be needed if we are to make serious inroads into the remaining easy/structured cases in a reasonable time, and the ability to run as an assistive script as well will allow much faster manual editing than is possible with the existing gadget. Mike has said that he can't offer a complex user interface, which is fine. I would think that a simple Python file that anyone can run locally would be quite workable. The output/input mechanism needn't be pretty as long as it is accessible to anyone who knows how to run Python. Here's what I suggest; we should discuss before actually asking Mike to implement it
A Python script, based on the one already written, with the following enhancements:
is|was a|an [+ 0 to 5 words] English [+ 0 to 5 words] football
This is probably getting into too much detail for editors to comment on before seeing some actual outputs. But, Mike Peel, if you're still willing to implement this I'd be happy to do some test runs and work up a variety of specific scripting proposals that I could then seek consensus and bot approval for. MichaelMaggs ( talk) 21:16, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
@
MichaelMaggs: Mostly this seems OK. For performance reasons I think it would be best to only do two passes through the category, one to prepare the short descriptions and statistics, and the other to implement them. I've been trying to think of a good way to run this that keeps users in control without them having to run the python code and do bot approval themselves, but avoiding having to develop a complex user interface. My thoughts are currently:
1. Have an approved user list on a protected page (so we can control who has access), like:
2. Have a run script page that the bot would keep an eye on (checking say once per hour) with a table like this one. We can define some standard formats like %BORNDIED%. Start/end could be the first letters of the articles, they might need to be more than the first letter if articles aren't ordered alphabetically. Going through subcategories could be an option, but would need a strict limit on how many levels to go into, perhaps just 1 level? And perhaps a maximum number to do at once (10k?).
Category | Username | SD definition | Must include | First sentence must include | Start | End | Maximum number | Holding page | Status |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Category:English footballers | User:MichaelMaggs | English footballer (%BORNDIED%) | nfobox | English football |
A | B | 1000 | User:Mike Peel/shortdesc | Ready/In progress/Done |
3. If the editor is an approved one, then the bot could do part 1 to prepare the short descriptions and to post them to the holding page as a table like:
Article | New short description | Wikidata | Lead sentence |
---|---|---|---|
Ben Abbey | English footballer (b. 1978) | English footballer (born 1978) | Benjamin Charles Abbey (born 13 May 1978) is an English former footballer. |
4. The editor could then change/remove these short descriptions as they want, and then add something like
Category:Ready for Pi bot when they are done. (I would like to add an requirement that the modified descriptions would be CC-0 so they can be written back to Wikidata as well if there's not a description there already.)
5. Pi bot would then load the holding page and implement the entries under "New short description" (probably double-checking that the article is still in the category to avoid it being used to batch-set short descriptions for other article selections), then move the page to a category like
Category:Done by Pi bot. Bot edits here are normally 1 every 10 seconds = 8640/day, so if fully loaded then we could get through all remaining articles in a year or so.
Perhaps this goes too far, particularly given that getting bot consensus in this area would be tricky. In which case I'm happy to go back to the original downloadable python script case. What do you think? Thanks.
Mike Peel (
talk)
17:06, 20 August 2020 (UTC)
Have just been reminded that I ought to get back to this project. MichaelMaggs ( talk) 09:24, 18 November 2020 (UTC)
If we want to post short descriptions using a script in a fully automated way (i.e. without a human manually checking each description), we need to decide at least roughly what an acceptable error rate looks like. It's worth noting that it is much harder to hit the error rate as it goes down. It's trivially easy to write something that makes an acceptable short description 90% of the time. 99% is hard, but might be doable with a lot of work on specific categories. 99.9% is going to be impossible for all but the most tightly formulaic articles. Error rate should be determined by a reasonable human looking at the short descriptions and making a judgement call.
For context, PearBOT, which operated on BLPs, had an error rate that seemed to be in the realm of 1%, and was approved. (none of the errors were BLP violations, they were grammar errors). My Species shortdescription generator has an error rate of about 5%. It generates much more descriptive short descriptions than Pear's (which were of the form [Nationality][Occupation]). It also skips far fewer articles than Pear's (Pear skipped 80%, I skipped 20%). I also put relatively little time into the algorithm, (~10 hours), and it's still pretty crude. I'd personally set the line for fully-automatic posting at 3%, but that's a judgement call, and I'd be interested in hearing numbers from other people below. Tazerdadog ( talk) 03:04, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
I have made a proposal to improve consistency in the way dates are used within short descriptions. Please contribute here. MichaelMaggs ( talk) 16:12, 30 November 2020 (UTC)
Whenever I click the
random article button to find a page that may need a short description, there's a pretty decent chance I end up at one of the gazillion moth species articles that exist here (most recently
Mesocolpia dexiphyma). The short description for all of these should be "Species of moth", in my view, and getting that to happen automatically would produce a huge bump in the progress bar of the project. Most of these pages have the template {{
Speciesbox}}, so that would be the template to generate it from. It uses the scientific names, though, so deriving "moth" from it (or, more challengingly if we want to apply this more broadly, deriving common names from scientific names) might be a challenge. Thoughts? (please use {{
ping|Sdkb}}
on reply) {{u|
Sdkb}}
talk
01:16, 18 November 2020 (UTC)
Hi User:Sdkb, you might like to have a look at the moth-related section below, and let me know what you think. MichaelMaggs ( talk) 19:05, 7 December 2020 (UTC)
In this section above I suggested creating a bot to make serious headway in adding short descriptions to the several million articles that still don’t have one. User:Mike Peel kindly wrote some code to get me started with my first bot, and I’m now ready to go with ShortDescBot. The English footballers category was to be the initial task, but as someone has since completed that with AWB I’m proposing to start with the 26,000 or so moth articles that still lack a short description. The moths seem a good place to start since suitably-precise short descriptions can’t trivially be generated from existing inboxes (even for articles where one exists), at least without expensive Lua calls. No changes will be made to any existing short description.
The aim is to keep the new descriptions simple so that they can be added to many articles quickly, while still maintaining a low error rate. It’s always possible to hand-craft more sophisticated text, but with so many articles still to do we should I think be aiming for ‘decent’ rather than ‘perfect’ at this stage.
The procedure is, on a category-by-category basis:
The moth articles are well structured, and it’s possible to identify “Species of moth” and “Genus of moths” with near 100% accuracy. You can see a sample of 200 or so proposed edits from Category:Moths of the United States at User:MichaelMaggs/Moths; note that the bot correctly identifies several articles as genus which Wikidata wrongly has as species. Of the 837 target articles in that category, the bot is able to fix over 98%, with just a few being skipped where it wasn't quite able to extract the first sentence of the lead.
The moths will be the first task for ShortDescBot. Assuming that’s successful I’ll then come back here to discuss future options, the next probably being a wider range of species and genus articles. WP:BAG approval will be needed for the task, and as BAG editors look for evidence of community consensus, it would be helpful to get some support in the comments below! Happy to take questions, too. Many thanks, MichaelMaggs ( talk) 19:01, 7 December 2020 (UTC)
You are invited to join the discussion at
Template talk:Infobox song § Automatic short descriptions. {{u|
Sdkb}}
talk
07:11, 20 December 2020 (UTC)
I'd like to be able to go through any remaining Vital Articles that do not yet have a short description to add one. Is there any script that could be used for this purpose? (please ping me if you reply) {{u| Sdkb}} talk 19:34, 15 April 2020 (UTC)
How do I find a list of all articles without a short description?
-incategory:"Articles with short description"
—
GhostInTheMachine
talk to me
23:02, 5 January 2021 (UTC)@ GhostInTheMachine: - Even using your link, I am still only seeing articles with a short description. It is listed at 3.6 million with that specific link as well, if that helps. Most likely something on my end. - UnguidedEmperor
@ GhostInTheMachine: Done, at this moment it shows Driveshaft, however this changes once I refresh the page, on 2-3 refreshes it now shows Point guard. - UnguidedEmperor
@ GhostInTheMachine: - Oh, that explains it, sorry. So in what cases should I import the short-description from Wikidata? Or maybe perhaps you could link me somewhere explaining this. Thanks for the help again. - UnguidedEmperor
I just noticed Loyola Academy is in Category:Articles with long short description even though its SD is short. I don't see any recent changes to the SD. This article has a infobox-generated long SD that has been overridden with a local SD. I'm guessing the category is added by the infobox template even though the local SD is the one that "counts". MB 15:53, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
Private, catholic, non-profit coeducational secondary (grades 9-12) education institution school in Laramie Avenue Wilmette, Illinois, United States— 148 characters
Catholic college prep school in Illinois, U.S.— 46 characters
{{short description
within the article wiki-text, or nothing if not found.These are typical results from the template
{{Has short description |title=Loyola Academy}}
→ 1{{Has short description |title=Rock Bridge High School}}
→short description not firstcats. I will try it in the SD sandbox — GhostInTheMachine talk to me 22:54, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
The following two articles came up in my petscan search results as not having descriptions Concordat of Worms and Public_international_law, but one redirects to a specific "anchor" section in the article, so I checked the main article descriptions as well as the redirect pages, and all of them had descriptions, so why did these two items show up in the search results as having no descriptions? How do we solve this? Huggums537 ( talk) 11:23, 5 February 2021 (UTC)
Wow, I was worried for nothing. I was thinking there would be way more "problems" to deal with, and I thought there would be others besides the two I already found, but it appears I "got lucky" and accidentally found the only two there were. Well, at least I still have a huge pool of descriptions to work on. Thanks. Huggums537 ( talk) 22:43, 5 February 2021 (UTC)
I have seen a small number of articles where the SD template has a leading space {{ short description...
– and in one case 2 spaces. In theory this is OK for the template itself, but the
Shortdesc helper gadget does not recognise this as a SD template. In a couple of cases, this led to somebody adding a second SD via the gadget. I have fixed all cases of this, added it to my regular checks and posted a change request. —
GhostInTheMachine
talk to me
15:17, 6 February 2021 (UTC)
It seems that the SD on list articles are all set to "Wikimedia list article" in WD. Any guidance on this? The title is usually self-explanatory (e.g. List of hotels in Chicago). Should we just import this, change it to "Wikipedia list article", or something else? MB 04:58, 28 April 2020 (UTC)
ShortDescBot task 2 is ready to start work on organism articles, as discussed above, and is awaiting approval for the task. Where the bot writes a short description for an article on a genus which is monotypic (that is, where the genus contains only a single species), it currently phrases it (for example) "Single-species genus of butterflies". I chose that in preference to "Monotypic genus of butterflies" as the word "monotypic" is I suspect largely unknown except to biologists, and doesn't comply with WP:HOWTOSD which recommends "simple, readily comprehensible terms that do not require pre-existing detailed knowledge of the subject." "Single-species" is, I believe, both comprehensible to the majority of readers and is also accurate.
But on Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/ShortDescBot 2 Mr Fink, who has some specialist knowledge, has indicated his preference for 'Monotypic'. I have no problem switching to that if there is consensus to do so, but would like to know what others think of the importance or otherwise of sticking to comprehensible terms. If there's no consensus, or no particular interest, I'll simply drop the idea of flagging that type of genus article, and stick with "Genus of butterflies". MichaelMaggs ( talk) 17:20, 7 February 2021 (UTC)
This could use some more opinions. Pinging editors who’ve shown an interest, from this section. @ Jonesey95, Dyanega, GhostInTheMachine, Pbsouthwood, and Certes: It's this very specific question I need feedback on: in the context of a short description for a genus, should the bot use “Single-species” or “Monotypic” for the relevant articles? So far I see no consensus which means I won't be using either. MichaelMaggs ( talk) 12:04, 10 February 2021 (UTC)
Genus of butterfliesis fine. Is
Genus of butterflymore correct? Perhaps
Genus of carnivorous butterfly, if that is one of their distinguishing features.
Single-species ...(or
Monotypic ...) does not really help the reader if they were looking for a rock band — GhostInTheMachine talk to me 17:23, 10 February 2021 (UTC)
Thanks all, those comments are really useful. I find the arguments against using both "Single-species" and "Monotypic" persuasive, and I'll change the bot so that it doesn't make use of either. MichaelMaggs ( talk) 09:34, 12 February 2021 (UTC)
What are we doing now for articles that don't really need a SD. For example, I don't see that a SD for
Alpine skiing at the 1960 Winter Olympics – Men's downhill would be helpful in anyway. I recall something that acknowledged there are cases like this.
Wikipedia:Short description says "Most mainspace articles should have a short description." but does not mention exceptions. Should this article have {{
Short description|none}}
?
MB
16:20, 7 February 2021 (UTC)
|none
rather than |None
then. That's OK.
MichaelMaggs (
talk)
19:57, 7 February 2021 (UTC)
What about the SD helper tool. Should it display something to indicate no SD has been explicitly selected? On
Desiigner discography, it offers to import from WD while on
Alpine skiing at the 1960 Winter Olympics – Men's downhill is says "missing". In both cases, there is a local {{
Short description|none}}
.
MB
16:56, 17 February 2021 (UTC)
What is the status of {{short description|none}}
? The gadget does not see this as an article having a valid SD and offers to import a SD from Wikidata —
GhostInTheMachine
talk to me
15:25, 6 February 2021 (UTC)
{{short description|none}}
. Search on hastemplate:"short description" insource:"{{short description|none}}"
.{{short description|Wikipedia list article}}
and {{short description|none}}
, so I removed the 'Wikipedia list article' one. Then the Page information showed the Central (i.e. Wikidata) description as 'Wikimedia list article', but the Local description had disappeared. Doing a mobile search for list of countries by h
offered
List of countries by Human Development Index with no short description.|none
leaving just {{short description}}
. That gave the same result for the Page information and the mobile search, showing that a blank SD and SD=none are equivalent.{{short description|none}}
to indicate it is intended to be blank, with the same result. We are now in a position to remove {{short description|Wikipedia list article}}
(or Wikimedia list article
once the SD helper is fixed to accept blank SDs or SD=none (so that eager editors don't continually re-add the redundant descriptions from Wikidata). --
RexxS (
talk)
19:08, 6 February 2021 (UTC)
{{short description|None}}
be better than {{short description|none}}
, given the guidance that SDs should start with a capital letter? I'm happy to update the instructions in various places once I know what's been agreed. See also the query below.
MichaelMaggs (
talk)
16:46, 7 February 2021 (UTC)
|none
, then the template needs no modification.|None
, then change the template and change the 358 articles that use "none".Should we change the guidance to reflect a new way of thinking about improving descriptions now that we have met our "quota" and the wikidata has been turned off for mobile?
Follow the discussion here: Wikipedia_talk:Short_description#"Duplicate_information" Huggums537 ( talk) 10:37, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
The red/green state of the project bar shows the project as currently 47.797% complete, but I think that may be a significant underestimate. If I understand the calculation correctly, the red part of the bar includes all articles (except disambiguations), and in particular it includes redirects. Since very few if any redirects need a short description, they ought to be excluded as well. Is there a way with a magic word or lua module to count how many there are and remove them? As there are so many it could make a big difference to our progress indicator. MichaelMaggs ( talk) 22:26, 3 March 2021 (UTC)
Going off at a tangent: should redirects ever have short descriptions? Should they be removed either selectively or wholesale? Should Shortdesc helper advise editors to go away when they try to add them? Certes ( talk) 00:28, 4 March 2021 (UTC)
At 06:10 UTC on 18 March 2021, the English Wikipedia officially crossed the 50 percent threshold on short descriptions, with 2,975,796 written descriptions! Sammi Brie (she/her • t • c) 06:11, 18 March 2021 (UTC)
ShortDescBot has successfully completed its addition of new short descriptions to all the moth articles. Next, I want to move on to categories of other organisms. This is a good bot task since non-technical short descriptions complying with WP:HOWTOSD can’t automatically be generated from the usual infoboxes, at least without expensive Lua calls. There are around 210,000 target articles.
Each bot run is based on a single category at some level in the tree that I can manually associate with a suitable common generic name. Sometimes that may be the same as the category name (Category:Butterflies --> "butterfly"), but often not (Category:Poaceae --> "grass" or Category:Onychophorans --> "velvet worm"). The bot then constructs and adds new short descriptions such as "Species of butterfly", "Genus of velvet worms", "Family of grasses" and so on. The text is deliberately simple so that a low error rate (<1%) can be maintained while minimising the number of non-standard articles that the bot has to skip as 'too difficult to parse'. For each category the procedure is:
The bot won't change existing short descriptions, with one small exception. A new feature this time is the inclusion of "Extinct ..." in the bot-created description of extinct organism articles, and also "Single-species .." in
Monotypic genus articles (where that can be done without making the text too long). 1300 2000 or so of the moth short descriptions that the bot created last time can be improved.
You can see a sample of suggested edits from a variety of categories at User:MichaelMaggs/ShortDesc.
Feedback would be useful, please, before I apply for bot approval. MichaelMaggs ( talk) 13:52, 18 January 2021 (UTC)
I've looked at the source code, but I'm not sure I'm understanding it correctly. You want to: a) identify that an article is about an organism; b) determine the rank (genus/species/etc.); c) determine a generic common name; d) determine monotypy or extinction if applicable. I gather a) is accomplished by presence of one of the taxobox template, b) and d) are parsed from the lead sentence, and c) comes from membership in a particular category. Am I understanding correctly? Plantdrew ( talk) 23:55, 19 January 2021 (UTC)
Done All done, so far as I can tell, but the category structure is so complicated that I may well have missed some categories. Feel free to let me know on my talk page if you come across any missing organism categories that are amenable to bot-generated descriptions and which are too large to handle manually.
MichaelMaggs (
talk)
17:31, 8 April 2021 (UTC)
Not sure how many users are still active around here, but I'd just like to draw attention to this category Category:Articles with long short description. There's many thousands of articles with too long short descriptions, which will need to be fixed at some point. This also can't be done by any bot, so any effort that you can give would be great. I'll try and give it a go when I have time. Regards, Willbb234 Talk (please {{ ping}} me in replies) 23:45, 27 February 2021 (UTC)
Trialpears, MichaelMaggs I attempted to change the SD of I SS Panzer Corps but the original SD remained and I had to go into the wikitext to remove it. This is likely an error on the part of the Shortdesc helper but it could be to do with the SD being too long or was formatted incorrectly ( the diff). Another point is the category mentioned above seems to have some false-positives in it. See 460th Space Wing, Lock and Dam No. 25, and Lock and Dam No. 22 which all have short SDs but still appear in the category. Kind regards, Talk (please {{ ping}} me in replies) 22:51, 26 March 2021 (UTC)
Infobox | Transclusions | Suggested short description, based on WP:HOWTOSD | Status | ||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Template:Chembox | 11988 | Chemical compound | ![]() | ||
Template:Infobox award | 10425 | Award | ![]() | ||
Template:Infobox book | 46515 | [year] book by [author] | Auto short description possible: not yet done | ||
Template:Infobox character | 7462 | Fictional character by [author] | Auto short description possible: not yet done | ||
Template:Infobox film | 144829 | [year] film by [director] | Auto short description possible: not yet done | ||
Template:Infobox medical condition | 8971 | Medical condition | ![]() | ||
Template:Infobox drug | 77377 | Drug | ![]() | ||
Template:Infobox body of water | 16676 | Body of water in [country] | Auto short description possible: not yet done | ||
Template:Infobox mountain | 25657 | Mountain in [country] | Auto short description possible: not yet done | ||
Template:Infobox river | 27682 | River in [country] | Discussion started | ||
Template:Infobox company | 77502 | Company in [country] | Auto short description possible: not yet done | ||
Template:Infobox university | 25758 | University in [country] | Discussion started | ||
Template:Infobox military conflict | 18680 | Military conflict [(dates)] | ![]() | ||
Template:Infobox military unit | 23693 | Military unit | Discussion started | ||
Template:Infobox organization | 29468 | Organization in [country] | Auto short description possible: not yet done | ||
Template:Infobox airport | 15480 | Airport in [country] | Auto short description possible: not yet done | ||
Template:Infobox road | 23546 | Road in [country] | ![]() | ||
Template:Infobox station | 50793 | Station in [country] | Auto short description possible: not yet done | ||
Template:Infobox football club | 24683 | Football club in [country] | Auto short description possible: not yet done |
There are many infoboxes that still don't, but probably could, fill in missing short descriptions automatically. Here's a list of possibilities that have fairly heavy usage (though I don't know how many instances of each already have a manual description). There are other templates of course, but not all lend themselves to the creation of a simple SD. I'm happy for the table to be corrected/amended and used as a working document, if that would be helpful. MichaelMaggs ( talk) 12:09, 29 March 2021 (UTC)
Please see: Template talk:Disambiguation page short description#Short?. — Goszei ( talk) 04:40, 3 April 2021 (UTC)
For section "Auto-generated from infoboxes and other templates" wondering if "Infobox sports season" can be added as Done? Noticed within Category:Manitoba Junior Hockey League seasons that at 2007 and going forward, the auto-gen seems to be working. I'm new to this WP so not sure if explaining clearly. JoeNMLC ( talk) 21:06, 12 April 2021 (UTC)
The tracking category
Category:Articles with long short description still seems to include articles that should not be there, which makes it hard to work through sytemematically. The very first article,
1 Train (song), is included even though the manual template {{Short description|2013 song by ASAP Rocky}}
was added to it on 26 March, presumably to overrride the default description from {{
Infobox song}}. Not sure what needs to be done to fix this.
MichaelMaggs (
talk)
12:27, 18 April 2021 (UTC)
2013 song by ASAP Rocky featuring Kendrick Lamar, Joey Badass, Yelawolf, Danny Brown, Action Bronson and Big K.R.I.T.from the infobox and
2013 song by ASAP Rockyfrom the local SD template. The infobox SD template adds the article to the category — GhostInTheMachine talk to me 13:02, 18 April 2021 (UTC)
|short_description=
as a field in the infobox, which then prevents the infobox from even creating the default one. --
Gonnym (
talk)
13:04, 18 April 2021 (UTC)
{{
infobox school}}
. This should be added to all infoboxes that generate SDs.
MB
15:53, 18 April 2021 (UTC)
Good news! PearBOT 5 recently finished its 100 thousand+ edit long run of adding short descriptions to biographies based on the first sentence in the lead. There is however more potential for this generation method and by loosening on some restrictions in the first run, such as going from always requiring the first word of the description being a nationality to only requiring that a nationality is present and allowing it to add descriptions to politicians articles which wasn't done before due to it not being able to with 100% confidence figure out their term. Now it gives them a description without any dates. There are also a few more possible cut off points which makes more descriptions fall under the 40 character limit and generates more descriptions. Here we have 300ish descriptions generated by the new bot. The plan is to start this run next weekend if no issues arise. There is also a thread at Wikipedia:Bots/Noticeboard#Second run. -- Trialpears ( talk) 20:09, 25 April 2021 (UTC)
Albert I of Belgium is in Category:Short description matches Wikidata and in Category:Short description is different from Wikidata. In fact, according to Petscan, we have no less than 33,706 articles with this situation. Fram ( talk) 11:07, 28 April 2021 (UTC)
Third King of the Belgiansfrom the local template and
King of the Belgiansfrom the infobox. The local one is the "live" one and it matches Wikidata — GhostInTheMachine talk to me 11:45, 28 April 2021 (UTC)
{{{noreplace}}}
is for —
GhostInTheMachine
talk to me
15:48, 28 April 2021 (UTC)deploy? — GhostInTheMachine talk to me 15:45, 28 April 2021 (UTC)
{{Infobox short descripion}}
that is designed to only function within an infobox and takes a list of several alternative candidate short descriptions generated by the infobox code. The infobox can then start with the original full size text and fail gracefully to progressively simpler versions. The template then emits the first of these that is "short enough", perhaps with the final option being no text at all. BTW – Starting a template name with templateseems slightly evil to me. — GhostInTheMachine talk to me 20:53, 28 April 2021 (UTC)
Wikipedia desktop searches are now being enhanced with a short description under each title in the drop-down list. Did that happen very recently? I could have sworn those short descriptions weren't there a few days ago. MichaelMaggs ( talk) 20:56, 28 April 2021 (UTC)
I've just stumbled across for the first time a See also section that makes use of {{ annotated link}}: see Christmas#See_also. It looks very good. MichaelMaggs ( talk) 15:24, 15 May 2021 (UTC)
I propose that Wikipedia talk:Short description be merged to here. These pages are both for discussion of short descriptions and should be consolidated. {{u| Sdkb}} talk 19:56, 23 May 2021 (UTC)
There seems to be consensus to merge this talk page into Wikipedia talk:Short description. I'd be happy to do it, but would like to check the procedure. Would it work to (1) archive all discussions on this page, then (2) turn this page into a redirect? What should happen to the archives? Should they be left where they are, with a note on Wikipedia talk:Short description pointing out where they can be found? MichaelMaggs ( talk) 15:47, 20 September 2021 (UTC)
When using the "none" option on an article, the "Missing page description" warning still shows at the top of the article. Shouldn't this be suppressed to avoid confusion? - X201 ( talk) 07:32, 24 May 2021 (UTC)
The article
Sodium sulfate has a short description of Chemical compound with formula Na<sub>2</sub>SO<sub>4</sub>
.
The view of an editor was that simple formatting HTML tags would be acceptable as they display correctly.
Currently,
WP:SDFORMAT says Each short description should ... be written in plain text – without HTML tags or Wiki markup
.
I assume it is correct that short descriptions should not contain wiki markup (especially links and templates), but what about simple HTML tags?
written in plain text – without HTML tags or Wiki markupmeans that "simple" HTML tags are not acceptable. JBchrch talk 18:40, 22 June 2021 (UTC)
Na₂SO₄
-> Na₂SO₄ //
Lollipoplollipoplollipop::
talk
02:34, 23 June 2021 (UTC)Why does Netherlands in the Junior Eurovision Song Contest 2015 have "Musical artist" as the short description? Thanks. Mike Peel ( talk) 18:56, 4 July 2021 (UTC)
There is edit-warring over description, which is nearly identical to the article's title. More at Wikipedia talk:Short description#Description repeating article's title. -- Triggerhippie4 ( talk) 21:30, 28 July 2021 (UTC)
Reached as of this timestamp with 3,620,088 pages. Sammi Brie (she/her • t • c) 04:23, 22 August 2021 (UTC)
On this page I am repeatedly running into an issue where a short description is entered, and the page reports Wikimedia template. Any effort to correct this fails. How do we sort this and get the correct short desc into the page? (should be "Asian rice dish") -- Whiteguru ( talk) 05:43, 7 September 2021 (UTC)
Hi, I've been writing an automatic short description for this template (see the talk page). Could someone experienced in writing automatic short descriptions check to see if I've made any mistakes? Thanks! ― Qwerfjkl talk 19:59, 19 September 2021 (UTC)