Wikipedia talk:Short description/Archive 5

This is an archive of past discussions on Wikipedia:Short description. 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

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Archive 3

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Editing existing short descriptions

I can’t seem to find any way to edit short descriptions of an article. I made a typo on one and I want to fix it, but it seems odd that there’s no obvious way to do that. The edit doesn’t even appear in the article’s history. CrocodilesAreForWimps (talk) 00:48, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

@CrocodilesAreForWimps: Please link to the page so we can see what was done. Using {{short description}}, you would edit the whole page where normally the template would be found near the top of the page. Johnuniq (talk) 03:54, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

@Crocodilesareforwimps: (after ec) Which article are you looking at? Currently there are two ways that a short description appears on an article: either {{short description}} appears somewhere in the wikicode (in which case you should be able to search the wikitext for it, and see it in the history), or it's being displayed from Wikidata (in which case you can edit it by going to the Wikidata item for the article, or by overriding the Wikidata description using {{short description}}). You can also use a script like User:Galobtter/Shortdesc_helper. Nikkimaria (talk) 03:55, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

Crocodilesareforwimps, The edit you made is at [1]. (I recommend the script Nikkimaria mentioned :D) Galobtter (pingó mió) 05:58, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

Note, should have mentioned I was on mobile CrocodilesAreForWimps (talk) 03:34, 2 July 2019 (UTC)

Making it clear that descriptions are plaintext

Hi, I've removed (This has been contested as some useful functions for wikimarkup in the short description have been proposed. There is no definitive consensus on this point.) and made some related changes to clarify that the short descriptions have to be plain text and cannot contain any wikimarkup. These descriptions are used as the equivalent of Wikidata descriptions (which are also plaintext) and displayed in various places links and formatting might not make sense (e.g. search dropdowns where tapping on the description needs to result in a different action, or non-rich-text mobile interfaces) so there's no way to render wikitext markup. (We could parse it and then convert back the results to plain text, but that is likely to introduce more problems than it would solve.)

(FWIW templates, magic words, parser functions and such do work, as long as the content they include is plain text. To be more precise, the short description gets preprocessed but does not get parsed. I did not mention templates on the page as it seemed more confusing than useful, given the intended use cases of short descriptions.) --Tgr (WMF) (talk) 18:26, 3 July 2019 (UTC)

@Tgr: Unfortunately, I've felt obliged to revert you. The use of short descriptions is not confined to search boxes and subtitles in the App. As they are used in {{Annotated link}}, a case has been made for the usefulness of wiki-markup, in particular, wiki-links. There is as yet no consensus on the issue. Considering that you already parse the text of the short description to capitalise the initial letter of the first word (even when it's "eBay") for use in search boxes/as a subtitle, I don't see that stripping out wiki-links should be a chore (we do it with :gsub("^%[%[[^|]*|", ""):gsub("]]$", "") in Lua modules). Nevertheless, that's your call, not mine to make. I simply want you to be aware of the position, i.e. lack of consensus on wikitext here. Cheers --RexxS (talk) 23:50, 3 July 2019 (UTC)

Thanks @RexxS, I wasn't aware of that usage pattern. ({{Template parameter value}} is one scary-looking template!) Stripping out wikimarkup accurately is actually not that easy in the general case (e.g. ''''x''y' is ''xy' but ''''x''y'' is 'xy - not something you can handle with a naive regex), but presumably short descriptions won't involve any complicated wikimarkup. In any case, we can always just pass it to the parser and strip HTML tags from the result (which is easy); that's a performance hit, but a small one.

Capitalization is actually more concerning; I haven't thought of that before. We do not make any capitalization changes for short descriptions; they are used exactly as they are provided. The Wikidata guidelines ask for non-sentence-case descriptions, so if enwiki short descriptions don't follow that, users will see a mix of sentence-case and lowercase descriptions - not the worst problem in the world, but still inelegant. That's not something that can be properly fixed automatically, since - as you point out - the capitalization of the first letter depends on the word too, not just the sentence casing.

On the other hand, the long-term plan (as in, it's not on anybody's roadmap currently, or formally decided, but it's widely assumed it will happen) is to move short descriptions (the ones used for search, article select and similar software features) out of wikitext and into some kind of structured data storage local to enwiki once MediWiki supports that well enough (cf. the Multi-Content Revisions project), since that allows the same workflows that exist for Wikidata descriptions, such as mobile editing. So eventually short descriptions used by the software might be detached from short descriptions used by {{Annotated link}}. In light of that, it might be easier to handle wikimarkup on the software side and accept capitalization inconsistencies for the time being. --Tgr (WMF) (talk) 10:15, 7 July 2019 (UTC)

Thanks, Tgr, that's interesting. The only thing that puzzles me is your statement We do not make any capitalization changes for short descriptions; they are used exactly as they are provided. Here's an experiment you can try:

Take a look at Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (Q3387840) on Wikidata: short description = novel by Herman Melville.
Take a look at Pierre Omidyar (Q348483) on Wikidata: short description = eBay founder, American entrepreneur and philanthropist.
Now, search using the Wikipedia App (or any mobile browser) for Pierre O.

You'll find that the second line of the search results forces capitalisation of the first character (Novel.. and EBay...). If you use the Wikipedia App, you can follow the link to Pierre Omidyar's article, where the subtitle begins EBay founder.... Somebody is capitalising short descriptions, although I haven't tried following the flow to determine where that happens. My advice would be to recommend always writing Wikidata descriptions as if they were sentence fragments, i.e use an initial capital unless you have a stylised exception like "eBay" or "iPhone", etc. But that's really above my pay grade, and I can't face the argument of telling all of the Wikidatans that they've got it wrong all this time. Cheers --RexxS (talk) 11:32, 7 July 2019 (UTC)

@RexxS: sorry, I meant that the API that makes the short descriptions available doesn't make any changes to them (e.g. [2]). Clients of the API might do further changes on their side - apparently the mobile app uppercases them (is that the Android app?); the VisualEditor link selector widget for example doesn't. --Tgr (WMF) (talk) 07:11, 8 July 2019 (UTC)

FWIW one advantage of using lowercase is that correctly sentence-casing a lowercased description is a lot easier than lowercasing a sentence-cased one (in most languages you'd have to guess whether the first word is a proper noun). Filed T227424 about that, thanks for pointing out the issue. --Tgr (WMF) (talk) 07:26, 8 July 2019 (UTC)

@Tgr: Ah, I understand you now. I agree that it's easier to sentence-case a lower-case phrase, although to do it completely accurately on enwp, you still have to check against a table of exceptions like "eBay" and "k.d. lang", where we go along with the subject's stylisation. Those are potential nuisances in infoboxes as well, when we want the first of list of values fetched from Wikidata to be capitalised. Cheers --RexxS (talk) 11:01, 8 July 2019 (UTC)

Character limit

Is there any prior RfC or discussion that establishes the "target of 40 characters" recommendation here? I noticed that both the Android and iOS Wikipedia apps impose a limit of 90 characters. (However, the apps only show the option to edit the short description, which they call the "title description", when the short description is sourced from Wikidata, i.e. the {{Short description}} template is not used.) — Newslinger talk 08:03, 11 July 2019 (UTC) Edited to correct information on the iOS app. — Newslinger talk 10:11, 11 July 2019 (UTC)

I don't think anything formal has occurred, mainly because short descriptions are new and largely unseen. Many editors add short descriptions but from a couple of discussions I have seen, it appears that many of them do not see the result in a gadget. In other words, nearly all editors are not familiar with what works and what doesn't, particularly since the result depends on the device. Searching this page for "See here for some results" shows my earlier comment, and the "here" links to some results I found by experiment. That shows 90 characters is about twice as many as are actually seen on a phone with a very large screen. Johnuniq (talk) 09:35, 11 July 2019 (UTC)

The current versions of the mobile apps display short descriptions in multiple lines when they don't fit in a single line (in both the article view and the search view). On an average-sized phone, 90 characters fit in 2 lines. There doesn't seem to be an upper limit to the length of a short description a phone can handle. Try it with the Video game article, which has a 150-character short description. — Newslinger talk 10:05, 11 July 2019 (UTC)

For anyone reading this who doesn't have access to the Wikipedia mobile apps, the screenshots in the Google Play listing and App Store listing illustrate the apps' handling of short descriptions on multiple lines. — Newslinger talk 10:23, 11 July 2019 (UTC)

When I type "video" to search in the app on a phone, I see a list of possibilities. For video game I see the following (many phones would show less):

Electronic game that involves interactio...

Opening the article shows the whole short description, but the point of the description is to allow the reader to identify the "video" article they want to see, when looking at the list. For that example it is pretty obvious which article is wanted. However, searching for the name of a person will show a potentially long list of names and the description is vital. The punchline has to be in the first 40 characters because that is all that can be seen. Johnuniq (talk) 10:25, 11 July 2019 (UTC)

I don't think we're seeing the same thing. My phone shows something like this screenshot, which does not truncate the short description on the search view. In fact, all disambiguation pages have the 96-character short description "Disambiguation page providing links to topics that could be referred to by the same search term", which is shown in its entirety. Are you using the latest version of the Wikipedia app, or is it different on iOS? — Newslinger talk 10:28, 11 July 2019 (UTC)

SD Placement

Hi all. BrownHairedGirl, changed the verbiage on where the SD should be placed, stating MOS:ORDER, which is absolutely correct. However, it was placed there with this edit, after a very brief (3 day) discussion, see [[Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Layout#Where to put {{short description}}]]. Subsequent entries on that discussion include a reversal of one editor's opinion regarding this matter. I'm not sure if we should do an RFC, but I do think that we should come to an agreement on its placement. I understand the argument from an AWB perspective, but this causes issues because Shortdesc helper puts in on the first line. While this was brought up by Kvng during the discussion, I don't think it was sufficiently addressed in the brief discussion prior to the change being made on the actual MOS:ORDER page. Onel5969 ^{TT me} 23:56, 14 July 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for the ping, @onel5969. I don't care at all what order is settled upon, so long as an order is agreed centrally.

So whatever decision is made should be made by discussion at WT:Manual of Style/Layout, rather than by editors primarily interested in one type of tag.

I suggest that there are three possible ways ahead:

amend Shortdesc helper, to place the shortdesc in the correct position per MOS:ORDER
live with the slight error by Shortdesc helper being changed by AWB
propose a change at WT:Manual of Style/Layout, notifying the participants in the previous discussion.

Hope this helps. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:08, 15 July 2019 (UTC)

I'm also in the camp where I don't really care so long as there's consensus and the relevant tools implement that consensus. I have the most affinity for a consensus that requires fewer changes to articles and tools. ~Kvng (talk) 01:25, 15 July 2019 (UTC)

I agree with all of that, Kvng.

However, I see that Category:Articles with short description currently contains only about 1.06 million pages, out of 5.9 million total. So 82% of articles are still to be done. So the most important thing seems to me to be that whatever happens to the next 4.8 million articles reflects a stable consensus. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 02:09, 15 July 2019 (UTC)

The short description is new and there should be no expectation that all five million articles are consistent. Whether some articles have the hat above or below the description is trivia, although obviously the issue should be settled and documented so warring factions don't do conflicting "fixes". Johnuniq (talk) 03:32, 15 July 2019 (UTC)

As a side note, it is impressive that over 1 million articles already have a short description. Nice work everyone. ~Kvng (talk) 13:50, 15 July 2019 (UTC)

It seems to me that the problem is created because the handful of gatekeepers at MOS don't use the same tools to view our content as the majority of our readers. Anyone who looks at an article containing a hatnote using the Wikipedia App will see the short description rendered before any other content, and well before any hatnotes. It's obvious that a reader who spots a typo or other error in a short description and tries to correct it will expect to find the short description before any other text on the edit page. These are the folks we want to convert to editors and it's crazy to confuse them by trying to prescribe having items in the wikitext in a different order from the order in which many readers will see them. What is the argument for putting hatnotes in the wikitext above short descriptions? Whatever it is, it surely pales into insignificance when judged against the common sense of having items editable in the same order as they are viewed. I've amended the guidance in MOS:ORDER to better reflect what I perceive as the prevailing consensus on the talk page. Let's see how long that sticks. --RexxS (talk) 17:30, 15 July 2019 (UTC)

I'm new to MOS and there don't appear to be gatekeepers. If a bad decision was made it may have been due to limited participation and lack of longstanding leadership (i.e. gatekeepers). Thank you for posting your ideas at Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style/Layout ~Kvng (talk) 20:18, 15 July 2019 (UTC)

Sentence case?

Can we delete the last bullet point under Content, which says "Use sentence case for short descriptions"? This is supposed to be an information page which "describes the editing community's established practice". Sentence case is absolutely not established practice; I have edited hundreds of descriptions using the gadget on desktop, and I've hardly ever seen sentence case used. Maybe that was the intention at the start, but the rule is virtually never applied in practice. MichaelMaggs (talk) 20:40, 26 July 2019 (UTC)

@Michael: I've edited large numbers of short descriptions, many before the helper was created and I think I've always used sentence case, so our experiences differ markedly.

As the gadget shows the Wikidata description field when there is no short description, and the Wikidata field is conventionally lower-case, it may have been simply convenience for the editor to import the Wikidata field unchanged, but that's not a good reason to do so. The descriptions are intended to be used as sentence fragments, such as for the article subtitle on the Wikipedia App or as search disambiguators on the mobile platform. Those are always rendered in sentence case, so I submit that the accepted usage is actually sentence case (which, of course, would include having short descriptions that start with "eBay ..." or "k.d. lang ...", etc.). Why would we want to use a different convention for writing the short description from that used when displaying it? --RexxS (talk) 21:12, 26 July 2019 (UTC)

I understand the purported rule to be about how you should add or edit short descriptions, not how they are to be displayed. If you select 20 articles at random from Category:Articles with short description I doubt you will see even a single example where sentence case has been used; almost all are lower case, most with an initial capital. To answer your question "Why would we want to use a different convention for writing the short description from that used when displaying it?" : because changing the Wikidata suggestion to sentence case essentially means retyping it, as opposed to simply hitting "Import" if the text is already OK. If we recommend initial capital followed by lower case, that can trivially be converted to sentence case for display if anyone wants to do so (the iPhone app does not do that, by the way - it seems to display the short description without changing the capitalization at all, so far as I can see, apart perhaps from uppercasing the first character. But that's by the way). MichaelMaggs (talk) 21:43, 26 July 2019 (UTC)

@MichaelMaggs: What do you perceive to be the difference between "initial capital followed by lower case" and "sentence case"? Nikkimaria (talk) 21:46, 26 July 2019 (UTC)

Ah, I'm sorry. No idea why, but I was confusing sentence case with title case. I agree that the bullet point is indeed right. Apologies again. MichaelMaggs (talk) 21:55, 26 July 2019 (UTC)

Maybe we can do better than to remove all guidance on whether to start the description with a capital or not. It is true that we have a mix of sentence case and sentence fragment in existing descriptions. I propose that we recommend sentence fragment (first word only capitalized if it is a proper noun). Fragment can be reliably converted to sentence case by rote by capitalizing the first word if not already capitalized. Sentence case can't be converted to fragment unless you know whether the first word is a proper noun. I'm sure we have use cases for both sentence and fragment variants of the description. If we enter the fragment version, we can derive either. ~Kvng (talk) 18:33, 27 July 2019 (UTC)

Fragment can be reliably converted to sentence case by rote by capitalizing the first word if not already capitalized unfortunately is not the case either - there are exceptions such as those identified by RexxS above. Nikkimaria (talk) 18:43, 27 July 2019 (UTC)

It's difficult to assess what is best, although at present, it doesn't matter. That's because the MediaWiki code that displays short descriptions as subtitles or search disambiguators automatically capitalises the first character, which leads to mistakes like "EBay ..". However, if we were to regularise our short descriptions so that they could be displayed without transformation, then we could could dispense with the code creating the initial capitalisation.

Kvng is quite right that accurate conversion from initial lower-case to sentence-case is too difficult because there are far too many proper nouns and no algorithms to use. There's also obviously no algorithm for converting from sentence fragment to sentence-case, so I checked how many exceptions like iPhone there might be. We use {{lowercase title}} to set the initial letter in lower-case for our articles, so I checked how many articles have the template, and it turns out to be 3,790. Not all of those are likely candidates to begin a short description, but working out the ones that would be useful to check for as exceptions would be a big job. Then it's quite likely that the code needed to transform sentence fragment into sentence-case would become very unwieldy as all of those exceptions would have to checked from a list. For now I still think we should stick with sentence-case, so that we can move towards the situation where no transforms are needed. --RexxS (talk) 22:50, 27 July 2019 (UTC)

@RexxS: can you explain what you mean by no transforms are needed and how sentence case helps with this? ~Kvng (talk) 04:53, 29 July 2019 (UTC)

@Kvng: Short descriptions are used as subtitles in the Wikipedia App. Here are some examples:

If you look at Lippendorf Power Station on the app, you see
Lippendorf Power Station
Lignite-fired power station
Note that the subtitle begins with a capital. There is no short description template in the article, therefore it gets that subtitle from the description on Wikidata at Lippendorf Power Station (Q462730), which is actually "lignite-fired power station". Obviously the software has transformed the lower-case description into the sentence-case subtitle. If we added {{short description|Lignite-fired power station}} to the article, there would be no need for the software to do any transforms.
If you look at Pierre Omidyar (Q348483) on Wikidata, you see that the description is "eBay founder, American entrepreneur and philanthropist". Our article Pierre Omidyar has no short description template, so the Wikipedia App fetches its subtitle from Wikidata. But when you look at the article on the app, you see
Pierre Omidyar
EBay founder, American entrepreneur and philanthropist
Note that the software has incorrectly capitalised "eBay".

If we only used {{short description}}, not Wikidata, and wrote the short descriptions in sentence case (including the use of "eBay" and similar as the first word), we could turn off the over-simplified transformation that capitalises the first word, and we could ensure that the subtitle is always accurately capitalised. That's what I mean by move towards the situation where no transforms are needed. --RexxS (talk) 17:16, 29 July 2019 (UTC)

That makes sense in this context but I beleive there are other intended uses of short description that would be formatted differently. For instance, on a disambiguation page or See also section entry: Lippendorf Power Station, lignite-fired power station. Here we want the description to start with in lowercase unless the first word is a proper noun and so the established wikidata convention makes sense. The only place it falls down is where the first word of a description has stylized lower case first word. I think the best way to avoid that fairly rare issue is to rewrite so as to not use such words at the beginning of descriptions. Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, American entrepreneur and philanthropist ~Kvng (talk) 01:07, 30 July 2019 (UTC)

The established Wikidata convention makes sense only if you're going to import description fields into the middle of running prose, which is forbidden on English Wikipedia. Unfortunately, as I stated earlier, we have 3,790 articles where the name of the article begins with a stylised lower-case letter, so these words may not be as rare as you think. If we are to retain the scheme of using the software to automatically upper-case the first letter of every subtitle, we are going to have to create a rule that editors must re-write descriptions that begin with a stylised lower-case letter. it seems to me that is putting the cart before the horse, where we are enforcing a change on how editors write, merely for the benefit of the technology. --RexxS (talk) 17:03, 30 July 2019 (UTC)

3,790 is, what, 0.07% of Wikipedia articles. What portion of those do you think would have a short description that would lead with stylized lower case? I don't think this issue should drive the decisions here. I'm not aware of the forbidden insertion issue. Were my disambig and See also examples invalid? ~Kvng (talk) 17:20, 30 July 2019 (UTC)

Whatever proportion it is, it's going be greater than the proportion of uses of short descriptions in running prose on the English Wikipedia. I suggest you familiarise yourself with Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Wikidata Phase 2. I don't think those cases should drive the decisions either. At present there is an identifiable issue with short descriptions beginning with a stylised lower case letter and I've offered a solution. How would your solution improve on that? --RexxS (talk) 17:30, 30 July 2019 (UTC)

I was thinking about {{Annotated link}} but that used a different construct than I assumed. I agree that your proposal solves an existing (minor) problem and because of current restrictions on how Wikidata can be used, my proposal does not solve any current problem. ~Kvng (talk) 18:34, 30 July 2019 (UTC)

Should a short description define or distinguish?

I've encountered many long "short descriptions". Most of these involve correctly defining the subject. Examples:

Young Earth creationism Belief that Earth and its lifeforms were created in their present forms by supernatural acts of a deity between approximately 6,000 and 10,000 years ago

I changed this to Belief that Earth was supernaturally created just a few thousand years ago

Hadassah medical convoy massacre 77 Jews on a civilian convoy to the Mount Scopus enclave, including medical personnel, slaughtered by Muslim Arabs living in Sheikh Jarrah in Jerusalem against the indifference of the British forces during the inter-communal stage of the 1948 War

I changed this to Arab attack on convoy bringing supplies and personal bound for Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem during 1948 War

Red Army 1917–1946 ground and air warfare branch of the Soviet Union's military

I changed this to Soviet army and air force from 1917–1946

When changing these, I found it helpful to focus on a short description that distinguishes the subject from other possible similar-named subjects, rather than one that defines the subject. I believe what I'm doing is in agreement with the template page guidelines, but that's not obvious. In fact, my edits may not go far enough in this (feel free to improve them, of course). So I'm asking:

Should we specifically state that a short description should focus on distinguishing the subject, rather than defining it?

And should we have few examples demonstrating this? --A D Monroe III^(talk) 17:29, 31 July 2019 (UTC)

I think that's a pretty good idea. I agree with the distinction that they should distinguish rather than describe. I would again emphasize that they should try to be done in 40 or less characters.Onel5969 ^{TT me} 21:02, 31 July 2019 (UTC)

@A D Monroe III: If we think about short descriptions are being displayed, we find them mainly as the article sub-title on the Wikipedia App, and as the second line of each search result as we type into the Wikipedia search box on the mobile platform. In each case, it's very useful for a user working on a small screen to be able to ascertain whether that article they wanted, or not. So a concise description that quickly identifies the topic, and distinguishes it from another topic is the most useful. I remember Wikipedia talk:Short description/Archive 3 #How much detail? where we discussed how we might improve on "chemical compound" as the description for Benzo(a)pyrene diol epoxide, and I find your edits equally useful for the same reasons.

I strongly agree that we should specifically state that a short description should focus on distinguishing the subject, and examples would be very useful. --RexxS (talk) 01:41, 1 August 2019 (UTC)

As a first step towards this, I've [ http://en.wiki.x.io/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Short_description&diff=909338046&oldid=906254171 added] a bullet point to this effect:

* The short description should focus on distinguishing the subject from similar ones rather than precisely defining it.

This is still rather meekly stated, and examples are still TBD. --A D Monroe III^(talk) 19:41, 4 August 2019 (UTC)

Short descriptions are used by WMF to distinguish between titles found in a search, and on Wikipedia as annotations to links in See also sections, and in index and outline lists. They should identify the topic as usefully as possible while remaining as short as reasonably practicable. 40 characters is a suggestion which is not always reasonably practicable while remaining useful. Sometimes no short description is necessary, other times 80 or 100 characters are needed to make any sense. If the description is longer than suits the search result, tough. It is better to be useful for something than completely useless or misleading. Longer than the arbitrary 40 characters is sometimes necessary, but we should try to get as much of the critical information in the first part of the description as possible.
The three examples above are great improvements in brevity while retaining sufficient information to be useful as annotations. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 19:47, 8 August 2019 (UTC)

Is it intended/appropriate to use the same short description on many articles?

An IP is busily adding the same short description to hundreds of list articles. They are all {{short description|Wikimedia list article}} which doesn't seem very helpful but I'm not a regular user of this template myself. Kerry (talk) 01:31, 15 August 2019 (UTC)

I do not think we have consensus on this one. Some users think it is helpful or at least it is not harmful and helps us to approach a milestone of 2M articles with short descriptions, others think it is useless up to the point that some remove such descriptions.--Ymblanter (talk) 19:44, 16 August 2019 (UTC)

There are a number where the WD description is a self-ref once on WP. In this case a short description will struggle to improve on the article title, except by being more general: a fictional genus list - List of Aragogii species - might have a short desc. A list of spider species. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 21:37, 31 August 2019 (UTC).

Long short descriptions

I created Category:Articles with long short description, for articles with short descriptions > 80 characters. Pages could be suppressed from this category by using long=yes in the short description.

Unfortunately, this includes disambiguation pages, even when they override the default long short description with a short short description so I have reverted my changes to the template for now.

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 22:30, 31 August 2019 (UTC).

Use sentence case for short descriptions

In the Content section is this statement: Use sentence case for short descriptions. It is technically problematic to have to convert case when there may be proper nouns in the text.

The second sentence perplexed me. "Is it saying I should not capitalize proper nouns?" It was only until I read through this Talk page that I was able to answer that question in the negative, i.e., use sentence case, which requires capitalizing proper nouns.

To prevent flummoxing other editors, I suggest eliminating the second sentence. Guidance should be clear and direct. Explanations for the guidance are not necessary.

I did not edit the statement myself because I am new to this topic. Thanks! - Mark D Worthen PsyD (talk) (I am a man. The traditional male pronouns are fine.) 19:33, 2 September 2019 (UTC)

@Markworthen: If we don't give some sort of explanation for the guidance, don't we just get continual questions about why sentence case is recommended? (See the archives and discussion above) --RexxS (talk) 21:33, 2 September 2019 (UTC)

Added here by Pbsouthwood. I read it as being difficult to convert to capitalisation from lowercase, when there are proper names involved. i.e. Capitalise proper names manually on addition, when needed. There's no problem going the other way (although also no reason why we'd want to.) Andy Dingley (talk) 21:45, 2 September 2019 (UTC)

I defer to y'all since you have worked on this guide and I just stumbled across it recently. And just because I was befuddled doesn't mean that other editors experience the same. - Mark D Worthen PsyD (talk) (I am a man. The traditional male pronouns are fine.) 22:08, 2 September 2019 (UTC)

P.S. The Content section is exceptionally helpful. For example, for Copernican Revolution I originally added, "Belief, initiated by Copernicus, that planets orbit the sun." I thought to search Google for "belief that planets orbit sun" and discovered that our (Wikipedia's) article Heliocentrism occurred 3rd on the results page. I realized that my short description failed to distinguish Copernican Revolution from Heliocentrism. I therefore changed the short description to "16th to 17th century intellectual revolution". Although I'm sure that my revised short description can be improved further, I was happy to better understand describing vs. distinguishing. - Mark D Worthen PsyD (talk) (I am a man. The traditional male pronouns are fine.) 22:36, 2 September 2019 (UTC)

Null value

I've added {{Short description|none}} to several articles which have sufficiently clear titles: ~~Albert King discography~~, Ball and Chain (Big Mama Thornton song), Bring It On Home (Sonny Boy Williamson II song), Come On (Earl King song), Double Trouble (Otis Rush song), Early in the Mornin' (Louis Jordan song), ~~Elmore James discography~~, etc. However, they continue to show a Wikidata description. Is there some other way to do this? —Ojorojo (talk) 16:15, 21 September 2019 (UTC)

With Albert King discography at least, it shows as having a missing description in the widget and I don't see any other default Wikidata description, so your edit seemed to work. Maybe try purging the cache to see if that helps. --{{u|Mark viking}} {Talk} 18:46, 21 September 2019 (UTC)

Yes, the discographies show "Missing page description", but the rest of the song articles have a variety of descriptions followed by "(Wikidata)", despite all having the same "none" in the template. It seems {{Short description|none}} does not override the ones generated by Wikidata. —Ojorojo (talk) 19:12, 21 September 2019 (UTC)

The only way to override fetching descriptions from Wikidata is to provide a short description. Using {{Short description|none}} doesn't provide a short description (obviously), so a value is fetched from Wikidata. if there was an easy way of simply turning off the Wikidata, we would have done that instead of having to supply 2,000,000 short descriptions. --RexxS (talk) 19:18, 21 September 2019 (UTC)

Thanks. Perhaps this could be clarified on the template documentation: "If the article title alone is sufficient to ensure reliable identification of the desired article, a null value of {{Short description|none}} may be used. However, this will not override the descriptions from Wikidata." —Ojorojo (talk) 20:13, 21 September 2019 (UTC)

I just added {{Short description|none}} to an article that had no template before, and it shows up as "none". Have now replaced this with  . Mathglot (talk) 20:19, 14 October 2019 (UTC)

Hm,   doesn't block wikidata, either. Also tried unicode double-width space (U+3000) which doesn't either (and wouldn't have been a good long-term solution anyway). Mathglot (talk) 20:27, 14 October 2019 (UTC)

Bot parameter for the template

Hi, just wanted to inform you all of my intention to add a bot parameter to the template for the purposes of my bot task adding automatic short descriptions to biography articles. The plan is to categorize them additionally in hidden Category:Articles with short descrption added by {{{bot}}}. Feel free to give feedback! ‑‑Trialpears (talk) 21:35, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

So the bot would make edits like this. Later, a person could remove |bot=PearBOT 5 if wanted (to indicate that the description has been checked)? Is that should remove? Johnuniq (talk) 22:42, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

Yep that's the purpose of it. I don't think it should actually be treated like a backlog though since it would have too many items to reasonably check. I also intend on making sure that the short description helper gadget removes it when the short description is edited. Sounds good? ‑‑Trialpears (talk) 22:52, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

Double description

Has anyone else seen the short description displayed twice on some pages, despite there only being one SD? I've seen this a fair bit today, and I don't recall seeing it before. Could it be linked to the update that has changed the edit summary from "Adding local short description: "foo artcile" (Shortdesc helper)" to "Adding local short description: "foo article", overriding Wikidata description "foo" (Shortdesc helper)", which I'm fairly certain has only happened in the last 24/48 hrs? Thanks. Lugnuts ^{Fire Walk with Me} 15:12, 22 September 2019 (UTC)

With the right css, the short description is shown at the top of an article. Is that what you mean? And some articles (example?) show two of them? That happens when the infobox has code to add an automatic short description and someone has added {{short description}}. Only one of them (the first, I think, but a quick skim fails to find the definitive situation) has an effect. Johnuniq (talk) 23:28, 22 September 2019 (UTC)

Hi. I have the app ticked in preferences to add it to articles, which I did some time ago (a month, maybe more). Over the weekend I've noticed that on some articles (not all) it displays two short descriptions in the top left of the article. I thought it was my browser, but I've tried it on different ones on different machines. Sometimes it's even on articles with no SD, showing "short description missing" x2. I'll have to get some screenshots later. Thanks. Lugnuts ^{Fire Walk with Me} 12:08, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

Indeed, we have a lot of articles where the short description is in the code but also in the code of the template, see e.g. Chubut Province. Was it one of these? Or have you seen two times the short description template in the code of the article?--Ymblanter (talk) 12:12, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

I've just checked that one, including doing a null edit, and it seems fine. However, I've just realised I did update my css a few days ago, based on this thread at WP:VPT. Maybe that's the issue, as no-one else has reported it. Would you or Johnuniq be able to test the css code to see if you get the same thing? Only if it's for an hour or two, and then revert back the code? Thanks. Lugnuts ^{Fire Walk with Me} 17:20, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

I do not mind testing it, but the thread seems to be about Monobook, and I am using Vector, so that I am not sure whether the css would be useful.--Ymblanter (talk) 17:25, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

I've got off-wiki stuff up to my ears and would need precise instructions. Are you referring to this edit at User:Lugnuts/common.css? And you are wondering if that causes two short descriptions to be displayed (I would guess not)? What article has the problem? What do you mean by Chubut Province "seems fine"? I see two short descriptions at the top of that article, namely "Province of Argentina" and "Province in Rawson, Argentina". The first is due to {{short description}} and the second to the infobox. I see those because of the .shortdescription line in User:Johnuniq/common.css. I do not have the gadget enabled and have no idea why a gadget would be needed—can anyone give an executive summary of what MediaWiki:Gadget-Page descriptions.js does? Johnuniq (talk) 10:20, 24 September 2019 (UTC)

Thanks both. It's literally repeating the short description, one above the other, on some of the pages I visit. It's quite random, but happens more often than not. I just thought it might be affecting others, but I can live with it. I did spend some time changing preferences and CSS code, but it didn't work. Lugnuts ^{Fire Walk with Me} 13:19, 25 September 2019 (UTC)

Well, I am actually worried by the two descriptions in Chubut Province. "Province of Argentina" is the one I added myself a while ago (I started adding them to localities/administrative entities before learning that it is coded in the infobox), and it is correct. Another one, "Province in Rawson, Argentina", is pulled out of the infobox by the code, and it ios incorrect - Rawson is the capital city of Chubut, not some super-provincial entity. I am not sure whether anything can/should be done with that, but it is probably a good point to have in mind.--Ymblanter (talk) 07:14, 26 September 2019 (UTC)

"Province of Argentina" (the first shown in the article) is the description used in the Wikipedia app. Johnuniq (talk) 08:03, 26 September 2019 (UTC)

Great, thanks. It means that it makes sense adding good descriptions even to the articles where one is coded by the template.--Ymblanter (talk) 08:08, 26 September 2019 (UTC)

Template:Infobox settlement calls Module:Settlement short description which adds a short description along with a parameter noreplace, and that ensures that the short description supplied by the template does not replace any short description earlier on the page. It's therefore quite safe to add good descriptions manually because they take precedence over anything from the infobox. You can check what is stored in the database by looking at the page info for an article – there's a link in the tools sidemenu. For example. the page info for Chubut Province shows the 'Local description' as "Province of Argentina", the same the 'Central description' (which is what it calls the description taken from Wikidata). --RexxS (talk) 13:49, 26 September 2019 (UTC)

Lugnuts, this is almost certainly a bug in Shortdesc helper, since I did change code related to loading in that update. Do you still experience the problem? Galobtter (pingó mió) 04:13, 7 October 2019 (UTC) (pls ping on reply)

@Galobtter: - Thanks for getting back to me. I've been testing it this morning, and it still shows two short descriptions on some articles. Lugnuts ^{Fire Walk with Me} 07:37, 7 October 2019 (UTC)

Lugnuts, I'm not sure why exactly that is happening, but I updated the script which may fix the issue. Do you still see the issue with the updated script after bypassing your cache? Galobtter (pingó mió) 22:43, 10 October 2019 (UTC)

@Galobtter: - Thanks again for looking at this. Sorry for the delay in getting back to you, but I've been testing this in different browsers and machines at home & work. However, I still get the same issue. I suspect it might be down to my CSS page, which has more fixes than an IPL betting syndicate. It's not a major problem, and as no-one else seems to be suffering with the same issue, I can live with it. Thanks again. Lugnuts ^{Fire Walk with Me} 09:14, 15 October 2019 (UTC)

@Galobtter and Lugnuts: I get the doubled description sometimes after editing one, but it usually goes away after a page refresh. Haven’t seen it when just reading. Enabled the gadget only recently, so don’t yet have enough experience to see whether it occurs on multiple platforms or in other circumstances. Using Timeless skin in Safari on iOS 11 at the moment. Had a couple of lock-ups requiring reboot, but not necessarily related to having enabled the gadget. (By the way, great job on the Gadget's editing and settings UIs being consistent with other interfaces the WMF is using with VE and mobile! It feels "native" rather than "add-on", if that makes sense.) Pelagic (talk) 11:27, 22 October 2019 (UTC)

Thanks Pelagic for your comments. Lugnuts ^{Fire Walk with Me} 08:52, 23 October 2019 (UTC)

Can confirm I also see double after normal content edits. Is not a huge deal for me, though. Pelagic (talk) 03:19, 4 November 2019 (UTC)

@Pelagic and Lugnuts:, apologies for the very long delay. I just removed the code until I have the time to properly debug since it seemed to be causing more issue than it was fixing. Galobtter (pingó mió) 00:47, 14 November 2019 (UTC)

No probs - thanks for looking at the problem. Lugnuts ^{Fire Walk with Me} 18:05, 14 November 2019 (UTC)

Doubled short descriptions from Template:Infobox settlement

We could use a little expert help at this discussion. I expect that neither of us really understands what is happening. Thanks. – Jonesey95 (talk) 20:25, 30 October 2019 (UTC)

Replying to my own post: Somehow I completely missed the discussion above. Sorry about that. That said, I am seeing two short descriptions at Brussels and Boston when I add a .short_description line to my .css file. My understanding was that the noreplace feature was supposed to hide the infobox's description, but that is not happening for me. Is it possible that there was a change to the code that controls short descriptions, allowing two short descriptions to be shown? I thought that only the last short description would be displayed. I can make four short descriptions appear; is that supposed to be happening? – Jonesey95 (talk) 20:36, 30 October 2019 (UTC)

I believe so. Each method of generating a short description is simply emitting some wikitext, and when you and I view your sandbox we are using some trick to reveal the normally hidden HTML. The HTML source of your sandbox includes the following:

<div class="shortdescription nomobile noexcerpt noprint searchaux" style="display:none">Short description from top of page</div>
<div class="shortdescription nomobile noexcerpt noprint searchaux" style="display:none">Short description from infobox</div>
<div class="shortdescription nomobile noexcerpt noprint searchaux" style="display:none">Short description from middle of page</div>
<div class="shortdescription nomobile noexcerpt noprint searchaux" style="display:none">Short description from bottom of page</div>

Only one of those (I think it's the first but there is more about that above) is the short description which MediaWiki will display to a mobile user. Johnuniq (talk) 23:56, 30 October 2019 (UTC)

Thanks. It is the last one that is displayed; I read about it in a long thread about short descriptions somewhere, and that is why infoboxes use the "noreplace" option: they are always below the {{short description}} template, which lives at the very top of the article, so there had to be a way to mark them as "not preferred".

In any event, I found that if I enabled the actual Short Description Helper gadget instead of using the .css modification, it showed me just the single, preferred short description. In the case of my sandbox page linked above, I see only the last short description, the one from the bottom of the page. It all makes a reasonable amount of sense now. – Jonesey95 (talk) 00:46, 31 October 2019 (UTC)

Template:Short description would benefit from a copy edit

This paragraph on Template:Short description is confusing:

The short description should concisely state what the article is about, not be a list of what it is not about, nor a list of what the reader might be looking for. Keep it short and simple. Avoid specialist terminology. As much detail as is necessary should be provided, no more—avoid listing examples. It will be displayed on mobile view along with other possible hits, and must be intelligible to the lay reader. Content of the short description should be considered part of the article content and should be managed in the same way as any other content.

On the other hand, Wikipedia:Short description#Content is fluent and illuminating. If it were me, I would delete the above paragraph and use portions of the Content section to replace it. For example, I would pare it down to the essential points:

The short description should be as brief as possible. A target of 40 characters has been suggested, but this can be exceeded when necessary.
The short description should focus on distinguishing the subject from similar ones rather than precisely defining it.
The short description is intended to be used in conjunction with the article title, and should be written as though it follows the title. Avoid duplicating information already in the title.
The short description need not provide an adequate definition of the article subject.
Avoid anything that is, or could reasonably be construed as, controversial or judgemental. Use universally accepted facts wherever possible.

To be clear, I am suggesting that the above bullet points replace the confusing paragraph on Template:Short description. I am not suggesting a change to Wikipedia:Short description#Content.

I'm not involved with Templates at all so I am hesitant to make any changes myself. - Mark D Worthen PsyD (talk) (I am a man. The traditional male pronouns are fine.) 21:16, 10 December 2019 (UTC)

Do it! Be bold! The template documentation is not protected, and you won't break the template by editing the documentation (as long as you stay away from the TemplateData section). Click the "edit" link inside the green box, which is where the documentation lives. Make sure to use the Preview button. – Jonesey95 (talk) 21:32, 10 December 2019 (UTC)

Thanks Jonesey95! I just finished with my edits (diff). I appreciate your encouragement and drawing the distinction between template data and the template's documentation text. - Mark D Worthen PsyD (talk) (I am a man. The traditional male pronouns are fine.) 17:33, 11 December 2019 (UTC)

Is bot= a valid parameter?

The parameter |bot= is used 543 times in transclusions of this template. If it is a valid parameter, it should be added to the template documentation and to the unknown parameter check that I have just added to the template. See also Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/PearBOT 5. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:12, 16 December 2019 (UTC)

Jonesey95, yep it is. It's used for tracking short descriptions added by a specific bot. I didn't want to formerly add it before PearBOT 5 was reasonably certain to be approved, but added it just now. I will update the docs shortly. ‑‑Trialpears (talk) 15:35, 16 December 2019 (UTC)

Short descriptions in templates

Is there a valid reason to have a short description in a template without the "noreplace" option? The reason I ask is because of this discussion: a transcluded template with a short description was overriding articles' short descriptions. Sure, "noreplace" or <noinclude>...</noinclude> tags can be used, but editors will continue to make this innocent error and inadvertently override articles' short descriptions.

If articles should always be allowed to override templates' short descriptions, we can probably do a namespace test and add "noreplace" automatically in Template space. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:27, 18 December 2019 (UTC)

Two potential issues that I can see:

We would never want the template's own short description to appear in other articles, so if a template has a short description, it should always be inside <noinclude>...</noinclude> tags.
However, some templates (often infoboxes) have been coded to generate a short description for the article where they are transcluded. I can't see any reason why they should ever override a hand-crafted short description for that article, so IMHO they should always include the "noreplace" parameter.

Perhaps we can do some insource searching to get an idea of how many instances of templates don't conform to expectations? --RexxS (talk) 01:54, 19 December 2019 (UTC)

Shouldn't these be in the template's docpage, perhaps as includeonly, just like categories? — xaosflux ^Talk 04:24, 19 December 2019 (UTC)

It looks like Category:Templates with short description has only 400+ members at this time. Most of them are infoboxes, which should be using noreplace, so a manual look through the non-infobox population should give us an idea of what the percentage of misbehavior is. I just fixed a couple that were transcluded in WikiProject pages, and I found {{Information page}}, which is worth a look by someone who knows about what short descriptions are really for. – Jonesey95 (talk) 06:17, 19 December 2019 (UTC)

@Xaosflux: The best place for short descriptions in templates would be in the /doc subpage, as you say, but the documentation page isn't obligatory, so cases may exist where a short description has been placed in the template itself. These should be fixed by placing inside <noinclude>...</noinclude> tags, or moved to a /doc subpage. --RexxS (talk) 17:23, 19 December 2019 (UTC)

Some templates, like infoboxes and {{Fungus common name}}, have a short description that appears to be intended to apply to the article(s) in which they are transcluded. I don't know whether that is good or bad, but a blanket application of noinclude tags to short descriptions in templates would break that feature. – Jonesey95 (talk) 18:02, 19 December 2019 (UTC)

@Jonesey95: agree - it is all about intended usage, I'm not trying to suggest a brightline rule here just general guidance. Unless the intent is to cascade the description to all the articles, it shouldn't. If the intent is to do so, the "template" short description probably needs to be a bit different anyway and they could use includeonly. — xaosflux ^Talk 19:43, 19 December 2019 (UTC)

@Jonesey95: Yes, these are the templates I referred to in my point 2 above: "some templates (often infoboxes) have been coded to generate a short description for the article where they are transcluded". To repeat: as far as I can see, they all should have the "noreplace" parameter in order to allow an editor to add a more specific short description to a particular article. If you examine Template:Fungus common name, I would say that it should say | text = {{short description|index of fungi with the same common name|noreplace}}This page .... Wouldn't you agree? --RexxS (talk) 01:50, 20 December 2019 (UTC)

I agree. We should have some additional guidance on this page, summarizing our findings here. – Jonesey95 (talk) 02:09, 20 December 2019 (UTC)