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Archive 1

Some history and explanation of this template for those without the time or inclination to read the full discussion

See also: Wikipedia talk:Wikidata/2017 State of affairs
  • In a nutshell: WMF have added code to the Mobile view and Visual editor which pulls short descriptions of Wikipedia articles from Wikidata, which is not displayed on desktop view or the wikicode source editor. Some of these short descriptions are useful as disambiguation for searches, and WMF basically refuse to withdraw the code on the grounds that it is more useful than harmful.
  • This claim is disputed by a number of Wikipedians, who find it unacceptable that potentially libelous or otherwise misleading information is anonymously associated with Wikipedia articles by non-Wikipedians, and that these descriptions are not directly editable from the Wikipedia edit interfaces (they are stored on Wikidata, which has a different community and different rules and policies)
  • There are about 5.5 million English Wikipedia articles. Almost all have an item on Wikidata. About 60% have a short description on Wikidata. An unknown fraction of these have a useful short description. Another unknown fraction have a harmless short description, another unknown fraction have a useless but not seriously harmful or simply incorrect short description, and some have a short description which may be in conflict with Wikipedia's policies, such as conflict of interest or BLP policies, and might attract litigation, which might be directed at Wikipedia as the apparent source of the short descriptions.
  • The short descriptions on Wikidata can only be edited through the Wikidata edit interface, not from Wikipedia, where the editors of the affected articles are often not even aware of their existance, cannot read them, do not know when they have been vandalised or are otherwise inappropriate.
  • WMF, fronted by DannyH (WMF), have proposed a software fix, which though currently poorly defined, is based on hosting a short description on Wikipedia which will be displayed when it exists, and they still want to use Wikidata where there is no Wikipedia short description. There are also alternative proposals, none of which seem to have gained much traction. At this stage the Wikipedia hosted short description is the most plausible and practicable solution, as it gives Wikipedians full control over the displayed description of Wikipedia articles, and can provide the functionality needed by WMF for their applications which are intended to make Wikipedia more accessible to readers, particularly those using mobile devices, which is generally accepted as a desirable function.
  • Until very recently, the timeline for this software was entirely unknown, so I proposed the {{short description}} as a placeholder. The proposal gained some support, the template was created and the experimental work was started putting in short descriptions of articles in WikiProject Scuba diving, which is ongoing.
  • When this software fix proposal is properly defined, the proposal will go to RfC as it must be accepted by the Wikipedia community in general, not just the interested parties involved in the current discussion. One of the fundamental components of the proposal is a short description on probably every Wikipedia article, to prevent Wikidata description from being used, so we will have some 5.5 million short descriptions to add. almost all of which will need the attention of a volunteer editor. The current template is a start on this, and a proof of concept experiment. If/when the functionality is written, and the software debugged enough to run live, the template will be expanded to provide whatever functionality we require on Wikipedia to allow us to maintain it in-house and to our policies and standards. WMF will be able to display it as Wikipedia content, and Wikidata can copy it if it suits their purposes, and use it as they see fit, without a conflict of interests with Wikipedia.
  • There will be a lot of work to provide every article that needs it with a short description, but it will be better to be able to do this in Wikipedia when necessary than to leave it accessible to vandalism through another project over which we have no control, and which does not have the facilities to monitor and fix vandalism as well as can be done on Wikipedia, apart from the possible conflicts with incompatible standards.
  • This is a brief summary, and is not necessarily accurate in all details, and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of all involved parties. You are referred to the complete discussion at Wikipedia talk:Wikidata/2017 State of affairs for the full catastrophe.
  • You are welcome to comment here, but if you have anything useful or constructive to add to the dialogue, I suggest you join the actual discussion, where your views can be appreciated by the other interested parties. · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 05:56, 9 November 2017 (UTC)

Possible move.

It may be desirable to make the short descriptions CC0 so they can be used on Wikidata. I would have no problem with this personally. To avoid confusion it may be desirable to rename this template to {{CC0 short description}} to make it more obvious. I don't know if anyone else has used the template yet, and as far as I know only one instance has been changed as of this date. · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 09:33, 13 November 2017 (UTC)

Discuss
I doubt that the short descriptions would have much value on Wikidata. As they are language-specific, the present descriptions there only have value for English speakers. All of the enwiki articles have Wikidata items; but items with an English article and no English description seem to be the exception, not the norm. On the other hand, licensing a set of contributions to a particular template as CC-0 seems fraught with difficulties to me. Simply renaming the template probably is not sufficient for subsequent contributions to be deemed as CC-0, rather than the CC-BY-SA that we clearly agree to every time we hit Save changes. Because I'd like to see the use of this template increase, I'd like to see as few barriers as possible to its adoption; consequently, I don't think it's so important to enable a bot to import these into Wikidata for any missing descriptions there. I accept that not everybody's priorities will match mine. --RexxS (talk) 14:29, 13 November 2017 (UTC)
I agree with RexxS about the licensing issue. It should be looked at in detail because it sounds very problematic. However, there have always been templates that behave this way: if I slap a {{PD-self}} in an edit to an image I've uploaded, that image becomes PD, even though in theory whenever I save an edit that edit is licensed CC-BY-SA. A similar situation arises if I want to do Wikipedia:Multi-licensing for the content I create, including text. Apparently templates are the way to go for that as well. Legally speaking, we need an explicit consent, but what that is is a different story.
We should also think about whether donating short descriptions to the public domain is even desirable. There are at least two downsides: First, we should strive for simplicity in licensing. Right now, as the disclaimer says "Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply." Wikipedia:Copyrights clarifies this a bit: "Most of Wikipedia's text and many of its images are co-licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike [and the GFDL] License" (my emphasis), excluding for what I assume are inevitable exceptions.
In addition to simplicity in licensing, this also offers us a chance to re-examine whether licensing Wikidata under CC-0 was a smart idea to begin with. The lack of an attribution requirement has attracted many re-users (notably Google Search) who don't link back to Wikidata, because they don't have to. An excellent Op-ed in Signpost explains why this is a terrible thing (virtually no googlers will reach Wikidata or Wikipedia or become actual readers and potential editors; CC-0 content can be modified without linking to the original making it impossible to detect hoaxes and other abuse). – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 15:09, 12 January 2018 (UTC)
There is no way these short descriptions will rise to the level required to be granted copyright protection, so the issue of licensing is effectively moot. --Xover (talk) 15:17, 21 February 2018 (UTC)
OK I am convinced, · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 08:30, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

Current use

I am mostly unfamiliar with Wikidata and was surprised earlier today when I learned that I have made a number of edits there, largely from page moves. Then, I saw this edit, and after reading the above discussions, I'm curious how {{short description}} is to be currently used; above it mentions being limited to WP:WikiProject Scuba diving. I would think that if the descriptions are as generic as "disambiguation page", that this should be added to {{disambiguation}} and similar templates, perhaps with a parameter that overwrites the default. I also see that discussion continues at Wikipedia_talk:Wikidata/2018_State_of_affairs#Short_descriptions about a WP:MAGICWORD; how does this template relate to that? —Ost (talk) 18:05, 27 February 2018 (UTC)

More information can be found at Wikipedia:Short description and Wikipedia:WikiProject Short descriptions. · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 05:58, 14 March 2018 (UTC)

"SHORTDESC" magic word and the placement of this template

Hi. Given gerrit:414633 and gerrit:419083, will this template soon be changed to use the new magic word? I'm having an issue with articles such as Alan Turing starting with this HTML: 

<p><span class="shortdescription nomobile noexcerpt noprint" style="display:none">mathematician and computer scientist</span></p>

When I try to get the first sentence of this article, this is what I end up grabbing, since it's wrapped in paragraph ("p") tags and it's very close to the top of the page, so it seems like a first sentence.

Perhaps alternately, can this template go at the bottom of the page instead of the top? --MZMcBride (talk) 05:16, 13 March 2018 (UTC)

Are you saying that SHORTDESC now works? Is there any documentation for that? A discussion above pointed out that it was important to introduce as many editors as possible to the new system, and that means that putting the template at the top of the article is required. Many people ignore the ever-growing stuff at the bottom so any templates added there would get no involvement. Johnuniq (talk) 06:04, 13 March 2018 (UTC)
@MZMcBride: I've amended the template to use a div container rather than a span, so that the MW software doesn't wrap it in <p>...</p>. Alan Turing now begins:
  • <div class="shortdescription nomobile noexcerpt noprint" style="display:none">mathematician and computer scientist</div>
and the first text enclosed in <p>...</p> is "Alan Mathison Turing OBE FRS (/ˈtjʊərɪŋ/; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English computer scientist ...".
Let me know if you spot any more problems. --RexxS (talk) 12:52, 13 March 2018 (UTC)
Hi RexxS: Awesome, thank you! --MZMcBride (talk) 02:02, 14 March 2018 (UTC)
Hi Johnuniq. It looks like "SHORTDESC" has been written/implemented, but not yet activated here. Once gerrit:419083 is merged and deployed, the feature will be activated on the English Wikipedia Beta Labs site, I believe. Assuming that goes okay, I guess the next step would be to enable the feature on the production English Wikipedia site. Tgr may be able to clarify. --MZMcBride (talk) 02:06, 14 March 2018 (UTC)
I intend to enable it tomorrow (or today depending on your time zone) on beta enwiki, then next week on testwiki and probably English Wikipedia if all goes well. There will be no doubt some kind of announcement. --Tgr (WMF) (talk) 02:29, 14 March 2018 (UTC)
Should be live now. You can test with https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&format=json&prop=description&titles=<title> (I'll add a page information entry next week). --Tgr (WMF) (talk) 14:18, 28 March 2018 (UTC)
[adapted from Wikipedia talk:Wikidata/2018 State of affairs:] I've amended Template:Short description to call the magic word {{SHORTDESC:}}, so that the API call now returns local values wherever the template is being used. Check out Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:Short description – that's 4688 transclusions to date. See:
as examples. I have enabled my personal css to display the template contents (see the .shortdescription entry in User:RexxS/common.css) so I can see what's in the template while we're testing. Let me know if any problems arise. --RexxS (talk) 22:42, 29 March 2018 (UTC)

Short description text is included in internal search result snippets

Hi. I'm not sure this has been explicitly called out, but when I search for "james buchanan", the text snippet is:

James Buchanan

United States president James Buchanan Jr. (/bjuːˈkænən/; April 23, 1791 – June 1, 1868) was the 15th president of the United States (1857–61), serving

I'm not sure we have any CSS class or parser function or other magic to exclude short description text such as "United States president" from these internal search engine result snippets.

It looks like phabricator:T30088 is vaguely related. --MZMcBride (talk) 02:17, 14 March 2018 (UTC)

Ah, right, so this template is using the "noexcerpts" CSS class already, but this class name does not seem to be integrated with the internal search engine. Also vaguely related: phabricator:T91344. --MZMcBride (talk) 02:20, 14 March 2018 (UTC)

FYI, this is expected when you hide content. Google has the same problem (this is why hiding content with CSS is bad). For the internal search engine, there are tricks however. They are documented mw:Help:CirrusSearch#Exclude_content_from_the_search_index. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:04, 28 March 2018 (UTC)

Checking results

Is SHORTDESC working?

Ada (d:Q154614) contains: 

{{Disambiguation|geo}}

Alien (d:Q226391) contains: 

{{disambiguation/sandbox}}

Kit (d:Q407477) contains: 

{{short description|Disambiguation page}}
...
{{disambiguation|geo|callsign}}

Scuba diving (d:Q1096878) contains: 

{{short description|diving while breathing from self-contained underwater breathing apparatus}}

Using the Wikipedia app on a phone, searching for "ada" or "alien" or "kit" shows a list of hits with the following (the text after the link is the description which comes from Wikidata):

  • [Link to ada/alien/kit] Wikimedia disambiguation page

Similarly, searching for "scuba diving" shows the description from Wikidata, not the short description above. I tried purging the article with a desktop computer then doing the search again on a phone, with the same result.

"Wikimedia disambiguation page" comes from Wikidata. I have seen other Wikidata dab descriptions saying "Wikipedia disambiguation page" which makes more sense to me. I can't make up my mind whether omitting Wikimedia/Wikipedia would be an improvement. Including the word highlights that "disambiguation" is a term of art.

I would expect these descriptions:

  • Ada Wikimedia disambiguation page (from d:Q154614—this works)
  • Alien Wikipedia disambiguation page - a page providing links to Wikipedia articles with the same or similar titles (from Template:Disambiguation/sandbox)
  • Kit Disambiguation page (from the short description above)
  • Scuba diving Diving while breathing from self-contained underwater breathing apparatus (from the short description above)

Johnuniq (talk) 06:17, 31 March 2018 (UTC)

The magic word works, but the data it gathers is not used yet by the products. That's the next step. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:35, 31 March 2018 (UTC)
That's an interesting new use of the word "works" that I hadn't come across before. Anyway, we can see what the magic word contains with an API call:
Note that as expected the "descriptionsource" for Ada is "central" (i.e. currently Wikidata), while the others are "local" (i.e. en-wiki). The point was not made terribly clearly, but the value of the magic word is being stored in the database as "prop" for each page. However, the (potential) applications for the short description, such as displaying on the app or in mobile view, in search suggestions, etc. haven't yet been revised to read that property yet. I assume that will follow soon. --RexxS (talk) 16:42, 31 March 2018 (UTC)
I tested two magic words in one article (Wagon Train): It had a bare magic word at the bottom of the article, and a magic word embedded in the short description template at the top. It would seem that the call returns the second one. I will do a few more tests, but my guess is that it returns the last instance on the page.
Tested three and it does return the third, tested four and five and it consistently returned the last.
Wagon Train has been reverted to a single short description template at the top, as the experiment was complete.· · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 18:27, 31 March 2018 (UTC)

Set indices

I have just reverted an edit to Template:Surname that placed thousands of name articles, which are not disambiguation pages, into Category:Disambiguation pages with short description in lieu of the more accurate Category:Articles with short description. Would it be better to create a Category:Set indices with short description instead? —Xezbeth (talk) 11:34, 30 April 2018 (UTC)

Perhaps, and make it as a subcat of Articles with short description. You'd just have to put |pagetype=Set indice Galobtter (pingó mió) 11:56, 30 April 2018 (UTC)

Position in article

Do these tags have to be placed at the top of the articles? It seems like more unnecessary clutter at the top of the page. Can these tags be place at the bottom with the categories without affecting function? Thanks. - BilCat (talk) 18:08, 3 May 2018 (UTC)

Yes, it's clutter. However, it is important that people learn about what's going on and stuff in the dead zone at the bottom is often ignored. If a user makes short descriptions visible when viewing an article, they will definitely see the description when viewing the page because it's at the top, and will probably notice any undesirable changes to it (such as attacks on BLP subjects). Johnuniq (talk) 23:39, 3 May 2018 (UTC)
In addition, when these are displayed in the Wikipedia app, they display as the very first line after the title. If an editor using the app spots an error and wants to fix it, they would not be expecting to have to edit somewhere at the bottom of the article. --RexxS (talk) 02:00, 4 May 2018 (UTC)
This looks like it will be a frequently asked question - this is not the first or even the second time I have seen it. The answers remain the same. Also, which version of multiple instances of short description is displayed depends on relative position. Easier to check and fix if they are at the top. (only one instance of local short description should be present, but it may override an automated short description from a template.) · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 06:31, 4 May 2018 (UTC)
There's got to be a better way to do this than adding more clutter to the tops of articles. In the end, this is just going to make the short descriptions easier to vandalize, and add yet more work for editors to do to revert it. - BilCat (talk) 06:44, 4 May 2018 (UTC)
Well, that's another regular argument. As nobody's yet come up with a better way, it boils down to: do we go for "easy to edit/vandalise and easy to fix" or "hard to edit/vandalise and hard to fix". I believe that the current wiki-philosophy favours the former. Security by obscurity was discredited more than 150 years ago, but it still comes back to haunt us. --RexxS (talk) 14:42, 4 May 2018 (UTC)
Typical. Make more work for others because we refuse to make tough decisions. - BilCat (talk) 23:41, 4 May 2018 (UTC)
You may not be aware of the background. There was and is a gaping hole in articles whereby extremely prominent attacks could be added to WP:BLP articles (or any articles) by simple vandalism at Wikidata. A large number of people read Wikipedia using a mobile device where navigation is quite different from a typical desktop user. Typically a mobile user searches for, say, "Clinton" to find a link to the article of interest. Because there may be a lot of pages matching that name (see Clinton), mobile users see a list of links and short descriptions. Editors here have to go to a bit of trouble to see the description and may never notice that it has been vandalized. Therefore it is necessary to go to a lot of trouble to put the descriptions here where vandalism is noticed and fixed. Johnuniq (talk) 00:00, 5 May 2018 (UTC)
You're really not helping. - BilCat (talk) 03:47, 5 May 2018 (UTC)
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