Wikipedia talk:Short description/Archive 15

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.

Shouldn't the short description for the page about short descriptions be an excellent example? The current "Brief phrase saying what a page is about" seems very much like a definition to me; it defines the purpose of short descriptions by summarizing the content of the page instead of being "a concise explanation of the scope of the page". The scope of the page, as is the case for most project pages, is to provide information about a project feature, policy, guideline etc. i.e. it's about short descriptions, not is one. The page describes defines itself as a "Brief phrase saying what a page is about", which is contrary to what the page guides users to do. So wrong in so many ways. Fred Gandt · talk · contribs 08:43, 28 February 2023 (UTC)

I have changed it to "Use of short descriptions on Wikipedia". MichaelMaggs (talk) 09:17, 28 February 2023 (UTC)

Michael's change is good, but the point about exemplary usage is also pertinent. It's long bothered me that I see two short descriptions on this page (because I have some widget or gadget or Gidget turned on): "Use of short descriptions on Wikipedia" is the one on the page, and something else (apparently Template:Information page via {{Infopage|WP:SDESC|WP:SHORTDES|WP:SHORTDESC}}) is giving me "Wikipedia information page". Should we also do something about that? Or am I just suffering because of my gadget settings? — JohnFromPinckney (talk / edits) 10:30, 28 February 2023 (UTC)

@JohnFromPinckney: because of the way short descriptions are added to the page as HTML with their style set to display: none, any gadget or CSS used to show them will likely show any and all present, no matter how they got there. If the explicit {{short description}} is used correctly (the first code on the page unless on redirect pages), it would be possible to show only that one or not that one with targeted CSS e.g. .shortdescription:first-of-type to only show the explicit one. Fred Gandt · talk · contribs 15:38, 28 February 2023 (UTC)

@MichaelMaggs: Definitely an improvement but how would you feel about something more along the lines of "Project guideline" to avoid SDDUPLICATE? Fred Gandt · talk · contribs 15:38, 28 February 2023 (UTC)

Would avoid using the word 'guideline' as that could imply that this page is a formal Wikipedia WP:GUIDELINE, which it is not. — Preceding unsigned comment added by MichaelMaggs (talk • contribs) 17:22, February 28, 2023 (UTC)

"Project guidance"? I really think "none" would make the most sense; if any page in the Wikipedia namespace is accepted as being commonly understood as a project page, it describes itself. Fred Gandt · talk · contribs 17:40, 28 February 2023 (UTC)

"Use of short descriptions on Wikipedia" seems to me to provide useful information over and above both "Project guidance" and "None". I'd prefer to leave it now. MichaelMaggs (talk) 18:09, 28 February 2023 (UTC)

While I can imagine that some mysterious-sounding, brief title or one about some obscure topic might occasionally need a short description longer than the article title, I find it somewhere between ludicrous and amusing, when a brief, simply worded title with obvious meaning is headed by a "short" description which is twice as long, and which is tying itself into knots trying not to simply repeat the article title in the description, where the best short description would be, in fact, the article title. Case in point: well, there's a millions cases in point, but Transgender health care just popped up on my watchlist, so that one is as good as any for now. The short description for that one should just be, "none". Or, if I missed a better description, I'd love to see it to pop up again on my watchlist when you change it. Mathglot (talk) 11:06, 28 February 2023 (UTC)

If a title is so clear that no SD would help, as in the example you've given, then "None" should be used, per WP:SDNONE. MichaelMaggs (talk) 11:56, 28 February 2023 (UTC)

What MichaelMaggs said + thinking of MOS:OVERLINK re common terms for especially short titles would probably be helpful for determining when SDNONE might also be appropriate, i.e. if linking to it in another article would be overlinking, maybe the short description should be none. Fred Gandt · talk · contribs 15:56, 28 February 2023 (UTC)

Thanks, both! Mathglot (talk) 18:38, 28 February 2023 (UTC)

If the description is "none", doesn't that just invite someone to add one (e.g. here), especially if they aren't aware of WP:SDNONE? How do we tell prospective editors that "this article doesn't need a description as its title is sufficiently descriptive" versus "this article doesn't yet have a description, please add one"? --Jameboy (talk) 13:18, 26 January 2023 (UTC)

On an individual basis; a <!-- note --> should suffice. Automagically though would be a bit different. Fred Gandt · talk · contribs 14:31, 26 January 2023 (UTC)

If this is considered to be a general concern i.e. it happens a lot, perhaps a good and simple first step would be advice on the template doc to leave a note alongside any nones (not to be confused with Nuns). A second step thought is to extend the declaration of "none" to something like "this short description is intentionally undesired; see [[WP:SDNONE]] for details", thereby leaving a note at the same time as disabling it. Fred Gandt · talk · contribs 19:25, 26 January 2023 (UTC)

When the content of {{short description}} is "none" I get a message "This page intentionally has no description." on the page, but the category shows the Wikidata description, which it should not do! Ideally the category should display "This page intentionally has no description", or "none" or even a blank space, but definitely not the Wikidata description, as this makes it necessary to check the page itself every time on is checking for missing short descriptions. I do not know why this is happening but it is annoying and waster of time, and is of no value whatsoever to the reader or editor. Cheers, · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 10:15, 13 February 2023 (UTC)

@Pbsouthwood, in the SDHelper settings, it sounds like you have it set to display Wikidata descriptions. You will have to turn that setting off to hide them. The average user won’t see this (doesn’t show in search info), and even the average SDHelper user won’t see it, either, since the default is not to show both WP and WD descriptions; it must be manually enabled. I enable it to know if I want to import the WD description or not, or to see if one or the other might have been vandalized. -2pou (talk) 11:00, 13 February 2023 (UTC)

How would this affect the display as annotations (maybe this was not clear) on a category page?· · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 06:14, 14 February 2023 (UTC)

This phabricator ticket is related. I'd like to suggest adding `{{SHORTDESC:}}` to the output in the `none` case, aka "the empty string signifies that no description is wanted on this title". If folks aren't comfortable adding those semantics to the page property values, then we could also add a category or some other means for tools to distinguish the 'none' case -- the current solution of outputting an HTML comment, which is then stripped by the legacy parser, seems not exactly useful. C. Scott Ananian (talk) 16:37, 28 February 2023 (UTC)

Cscott, see #Possible mismatch when generating for mobile versus desktop? on this page. I tried a variety of fixes in the sandbox and was unable to make any of them do what I expected or hoped. – Jonesey95 (talk) 19:51, 28 February 2023 (UTC)

Yes, part of this proposal involves explicitly making {{SHORTDESC:}} override an inherited short description, and there might need to be fixes to the {{SHORTDESC}} magic word implementation to make that all work right. I'll copy some additional context into phab:T326898 to help work through this. C. Scott Ananian (talk) 22:31, 28 February 2023 (UTC)

"Short descriptions exceeding 40 characters may be truncated in some contexts" - I was just wondering if the 40 characters includes spaces or not? - Arjayay (talk) 16:33, 9 March 2023 (UTC)

Yes it does MichaelMaggs (talk) 16:38, 9 March 2023 (UTC)

Thanks MichaelMaggs - should this be made clear on the project page? - Arjayay (talk) 16:56, 9 March 2023 (UTC)

Done. MichaelMaggs (talk) 16:23, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

Like this or this?--Marc Lacoste (talk) 09:56, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

No. See WP:SDFORMAT. Plain text only. - X201 (talk) 12:02, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

Though I guess we could make that explicit (add "unicode characters" to the existing "without HTML tags or wiki markup"). Does that seem like a potentially controversial change? If not, I would go ahead and add that. The editor in question (@ToniTurunen) (and possibly others) seems to think that the use of emojis is a good way to keep the SD short. Felida⁹⁷ (talk) 13:55, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

Personally I'd go the whole hog and copy the list from the top of MOS:ICON "typographic dingbats, emojis, or CSS display manipulation". It also seems like we may need to know how far this has spread. @Jonesey95: would a quick sample to detect SDs containing anything other than ABC...xyz and 123... be feasible? - X201 (talk) 14:35, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

Checking for a specific character set is probably feasible. The list immediately above is incomplete, however, since accented characters, at least some non-English-language characters, and a variety of punctuation characters should be allowed (just a few examples: —'"&;:!°./\$%^*+~<>#ταλκ()-?,ößáàăâåäãāảạæćČçĐéèêếềễěëėęēệíìîïİįīịıĽńñóòôỗöõøōơờọœřšŞúùûüũūưứýỳ). If anyone knows of a way to check for a set of Unicode characters that could reasonably appear in a short description, feel free to post it here. – Jonesey95 (talk) 16:11, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

Using insource:regex searches are possible, but without a full charset it's likely to return a lot of false positives to wade through. Also note that complex regex searches can timeout due to server load. Fred Gandt · talk · contribs 16:19, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

Could make the template check and categorize short descriptions that use non-standard characters. Galobtter (pingó mió) 19:57, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

Yes, as I tried to say above. If someone comes up with a complete list of such non-standard / forbidden characters, or a complete list of permissible characters, I can work on a check for them. – Jonesey95 (talk) 20:44, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

Added as suggested. Felida⁹⁷ (talk) 16:42, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

this search (although timing out) is already bringing the returns down to ~1,500 (YMMV) and is quite rudimentary. At least it's an indicationation that there's not an exceptional problem to handle. Fred Gandt · talk · contribs 23:14, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

Search insource:/\{\{ *(?:S|s)hort description\|[ÁáäāãÉéêèëÎīíîöôōóṓŏõūüçḏğñŠșšț₂³°a-zA-Z0-9(–)-|\/=,;:.'"+%& ]*[^ÁáäāãÉéêèëÎīíîöôōóṓŏõūüçḏğñŠșšț₂³°a-zA-Z0-9(–)-|\/=,;:.'"+%& }]+/ and we're down to 337 (YMMV); the search won't accept a longer query string 🤦‍♀️ Quite a lot of them have unusual whitespace characters; I was working through them but am tired; will carry on after sleeping. Fred Gandt · talk · contribs 03:31, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

Here's a refined version of the above search (currently 297 results). It still catches a few valid characters, but I'm seeing a lot of invalid space characters, em dashes, and curly apostrophes that should be fixed. – Jonesey95 (talk) 03:47, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

That will miss any with leading invalid first characters i.e. there has to be one of that limited set of valid chars before the screen for invalid chars for the match (that's why the doubling I did). Also, many of the special chars in the charset don't need to be escaped because they're in the set e.g. (JS) 'a(a)a{a}a"a:a=a?a'.match( /[(){}":=?]+/g ) is perfectly fine; only special chars that are special in sets need to be escaped e.g. [\[\]\-]. It's 5am for me so these sentences were hard work 😉 Fred Gandt · talk · contribs 04:53, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

@Fred Gandt, can't you start with [^}]*? or similar (maybe . instead of [^}]). — Qwerfjkltalk 09:03, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

I wasn't really thinking about it very much to be honest, just adding stuff 'till I couldn't, being satisfied once the results went below 500; now they can all be worked through from one results page. Clearing out the majority, with dodgy white space, will render the remains as much more easily manageable. The ranges a-zA-Z0-9 and _ can all be \w too. Fred Gandt · talk · contribs 13:40, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

• I cannot think of an example that would be acceptable. Those two examples are definitely not acceptable. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 19:00, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

Does anyone know a close percentage of reader who view short descriptions? Is it all mobile users or just some? I've never seen a short descriptor on a page (having decided long ago not to view the internet on a phone and carry the addiction around with me), so am unsure how prevalent they are to Wikipedia readers. Thanks. Randy Kryn (talk) 23:11, 12 March 2023 (UTC)

@Randy Kryn With Vector 2022, the search preview shows short descriptions, so now the short description is relevant for all readers who use the search functionality. Galobtter (pingó mió) 02:15, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

I believe that all mobile users see short descriptions, both as part of the article and when carrying out a search. Vector 2022 desktop users (including all non-logged-in readers) see them when searching. Users of Vector 2022 or other desktop skins who have loaded the SD gadget also see them as part of the article. The proportion of users who don't see them must overall be quite small now. MichaelMaggs (talk) 10:37, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

Thanks Galobtter and MichaelMaggs, I use Monobook so have missed that. Just checked the Vector 2022 skin to see what they look like in the search there, and as a Monobook user they seem an extra distraction but do enhance quick information if worded well. There is presently a discussion about the short description at Talk:John Adams which may be of interest, and thanks again. Randy Kryn (talk) 11:05, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

Hi y'all – Do you know why the nomobile class was applied to the {{Short description}} template?

The class was added back in 2017 presumably to ensure the short description text doesn't appear in the middle of the article. cc @TheDJ who it looks like made the change.

For context, the Editing Team wonders the above as we plan a change that will enable people to edit the {{Short description}} using the mobile visual editor. Note: it will NOT have any impact on how/if the short description appears to people who are reading an article.

Also, thank you to @Shushugah for drawing the Editing Team's attention to this issue. PPelberg (WMF) (talk) 21:42, 20 March 2023 (UTC)

I'm not entirely sure. Could have been because of lead detection for infobox, or because the template just wasn't really doing anything at that moment and i was just being over cautious or something. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 22:00, 20 March 2023 (UTC)

Understood and thank you for the quick response, @TheDJ.

The change that will make the template editable within mobile VE should be live on all wikis this Thursday, 23 March.

If you, or anyone else here, notices anything unexpected, please comment here or on the task (T332626). PPelberg (WMF) (talk) 22:15, 20 March 2023 (UTC)

The new Vector 2022 skin truncates short descriptions in incremental search results. Does anybody know if there is a Phabricator task treating this as a bug? Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 19:20, 22 March 2023 (UTC)

I don't think it's a bug. Short descriptions are meant to be short; there's a reason WP:SDLENGTH exists. Galobtter (pingó mió) 19:56, 22 March 2023 (UTC)

Barnards.tar.gz may be looking for T311277. – Jonesey95 (talk) 21:01, 22 March 2023 (UTC)

Thanks. That’s exactly the bug I thought somebody would have filed. I was wondering if the WMF had taken a position on whether a truncated short description was a problem with the length of the short description rather than a bug in the software. There is a developer comment that seems to not see any problem here, as long as the first ~40-50 characters does the job of disambiguating search results - and that in turn makes me wonder what the purpose of short descriptions longer than ~40-50 characters is. I guess they are for the mobile app? Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 06:59, 23 March 2023 (UTC)

There are reams of discussion in the archives of this talk page about the 40-character recommendation. In part, the length recommendation is the tail wagging the dog: as you can see in the phab ticket, developers think that 40 or so is enough for the purpose, so they are not inclined to change the software to accommodate longer descriptions. My rough estimate is that most editors working on short descriptions think this way as well. Please do read the archives before reopening this Pandora's box, as any discussion is likely a lot more heat than light. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:10, 23 March 2023 (UTC)

Hello. I don't know if this is an issue with this template specifically. Currently at List of Marvel Cinematic Universe television series, the SD is set in the article to "none" per WP:SDNONE. When I view that article on the desktop site (Mac OS, Chrome, Vector legacy skin), I see "This page intentionally has no description." as expected. However, if I search on the mobile site, the SD shows up as "0000 American TV series or program" (see here). That article is using {{Infobox television}}, which in turn is using {{Infobox television/Short description}}, but it was believed that using SD on the article would override the "television/Short description". I also noticed that Hellknowz addressed a similar "0000" output happening with {{Infobox video game}} here so I don't know if the two are possibly related and it stems from a larger issue at the main SD template. Thanks for anyone's assistance on this. - Favre1fan93 (talk) 18:11, 23 December 2022 (UTC)

I have applied the same edit here to see if it fixes the problem. Now it is showing "2013 American TV series or program" because "2013" is a string that exists within |released=. I think the problem is that "none" is not taking precedence, which I believe it should because of the |2=noreplace that is in the SD subtemplate. That might be a bug to report at {{Short description}}'s talk page. – Jonesey95 (talk) 19:27, 23 December 2022 (UTC)

@Jonesey95: Thanks for the change to the television template. Just noting this discussion is on the main SD talk, so hopefully other eyes can see it and figure out if there is a bug! - Favre1fan93 (talk) 19:31, 23 December 2022 (UTC)

I have adjusted the text above to reflect my boneheadedness. – Jonesey95 (talk) 19:33, 23 December 2022 (UTC)

@Jonesey95, this is because {{Short description|none}} just produces <nowiki />, which the noreplace doesn't care about. It should really produce {{SHORTDESC:}} or if that doesn't work, {{SHORTDESC:{{zwsp}}}} or suchlike. — Qwerfjkltalk 09:37, 24 December 2022 (UTC)

I have been playing around in the sandbox with inserting an empty span tag for an SD of "none", but I haven't been able to come up with something that controls the short description. I've been testing on User:Jonesey95 by inserting {{Short description/sandbox|none}} followed by {{user page}}. The latter template generates an SD of "Wikipedia editor" and properly uses "noreplace". I have been unable to prevent "Wikipedia editor" from appearing under my User page name in the Vector 2022 search results when I search for "User:Jonesey95". Any ideas are welcome. – Jonesey95 (talk) 22:37, 26 January 2023 (UTC)

@Jonesey95, Have you tried {{SHORTDESC:}} or {{SHORTDESC:{{zwsp}}}}? — Qwerfjkltalk 10:26, 29 January 2023 (UTC)

Hmm, I see you've done that in the sandbox. Could be caching? Try querying the API to get the SD. — Qwerfjkltalk 10:28, 29 January 2023 (UTC)

Bumping. I feel like there must be some straightforward way to do this. – Jonesey95 (talk) 19:13, 19 February 2023 (UTC)

In WP:TH#How to fix a number in an infobox? it was the use of {{plainlist}} which was causing the problem, so it may be worth looking to see whether it's the same here. - David Biddulph (talk) 19:36, 23 December 2022 (UTC)

This mismatch you mention is really a bug in Wikipedia:Shortdesc helper. But what really should be fixed is that "none" should override the other description. I'll see if there's a way to fix here or if a phab task needs to be filed. Galobtter (pingó mió) 08:10, 23 March 2023 (UTC)

Using {{zwsp}} seems to override the short description as expected, as displayed using "Page information". I have to see if that causes rendering issue with having an empty short description. Galobtter (pingó mió) 08:23, 23 March 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, there is a rendering issue where the search results will not act completely like there's no short description if there's a {{zwsp}} and will move the page title in the search result box upwards to make space for a short description despite it being functionally empty. Looks like phab:T326898 will fix this though. Galobtter (pingó mió) 06:37, 24 March 2023 (UTC)

In this revision, I made a wikitable that can better organize the statistics of the number of articles with short descriptions over the years.

Progress of the project was recorded on specific dates every month since July 2020. To complete the wikitable, the total number of articles in English Wikipedia at each of those dates have to be known, in order to calculate the progress in form of percentages. Can anyone help me in getting those statistics?

Here is the wikitable:

— CrafterNova ^{[ TALK ] [ CONT ]} 14:55, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

@CrafterNova, Wikipedia:Size of Wikipedia#The data set. — Qwerfjkltalk 17:15, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

Thank you :) — CrafterNova ^{[ TALK ] [ CONT ]} 17:18, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

Hello, is there any tool, link, gadget, etc. that would show you a list of pages without short descriptions? Or at least take you to a random one? CanO27sprite (talk) 22:46, 21 April 2023 (UTC)

You can search for articles that don't have the template {{short description}} using this search. Galobtter (talk) 22:50, 21 April 2023 (UTC)

See the links in this discussion and this discussion. This search, for example, still pulls up 1,300 person articles without SDs. – Jonesey95 (talk) 02:39, 22 April 2023 (UTC)

Also see: Wikipedia:WikiProject_Short_descriptions#How_do_I_find_articles_with_no_short_description? — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 07:26, 22 April 2023 (UTC)

Does anyone know why Antiochus I of Commagene is logged on the Articles with long short description category? Shortdesc Helper shows that its short description is only 30 characters long. I also can’t remove the category because it is automatically applied. Liu1126 (talk) 06:32, 15 May 2023 (UTC)

Alright, it’s been fixed now. Liu1126 (talk) 10:14, 15 May 2023 (UTC)

I'm using the gadget (and https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&limit=50&offset=50&ns0=1&ns1=1&search=-hastemplate%3A"Short+description") and wanting to comply with everything but unsure about apparent conflicting advice regarding capitalization. I've checked the archives back to number 8 without seeing clear answers.

• "When the description does not yet exist in Wikidata and one types all the text in lower case using Shortdesc helper, it sends the description in lower case to Wikidata while simultaneously formatting the short description of the Wikipedia page in Sentence case. However, when exporting a modified short description back to Wikidata, it is not the case. Then, it is necessary to manually edit the Wikidata description to change the first Uppercase letter of the sentence into a lower case. "

I'm starting each new or edited SD with lower-case (as is recommended on some page that I read), and the result appears as Upper on the WP page, so that seems OK.

For a new added SD, am I meant to type "all the text in lower case" (even for proper nouns) so that WD gets it all that way? Then how would WP add necessary capitals?

"when exporting a modified short description back to Wikidata" - I'm not consciously exporting to WD - but am I doing that without realising? Does that happen every time I click "edit and import"? How do I "manually edit the Wikidata description" without opening WD? (I'd rather not complicate my life by learning how to do things in WD.)

Does "change the first Uppercase letter of the sentence" really mean "change the Uppercase first letter of the SD"?

Anyone's welcome to check my recent edits and tell me which, if any, are wrong in any respect. (Don't expect prompt response - I'm off to bed now. Robin Patterson (talk) 14:22, 14 May 2023 (UTC)

@Robin Patterson, when adding an SD, only type it lowercase if it wouldn't normally be capitalised (i.e. don't type it lowercase if it's a proper noun). It isn't exported by default when editing an SD. You need to click the 'export' button to export to WD - if you do so, it will retain the capitalisation, so you may need to go to WD and edit the description there to correct that (you can't do this without going to WD). The export button looks like this: — Qwerfjkltalk 16:03, 14 May 2023 (UTC)

Thank you. All clear for now. I'll just avoid the tricky-looking ones. Robin Patterson (talk) 02:50, 15 May 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, I don't understand why the export retains the initial cap. It is many clicks to go back and edit the Wikidata so I don't use the export unless the description starts with a proper noun. I've previously requested a checkbox to make this better but that's not happened. ~Kvng (talk) 14:27, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

@Kvng, probably because a lot more words always start with an uppercase, than always start with a lowercase. Though I agree there should be a choice. — Qwerfjkltalk 15:22, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

@Jonesey95 - Regarding your revert
(1) I changed "a short descriptive annotation" to "a brief overview or summary
(2) You restored "a short descriptive annotation" because "a short description is specifically not a summary."
(3) However, the cite I had provided says a "descriptive annotation" is "a brief summary."
(4) What do you think about making the text "a short description" (taking out "annotation")? So, what is it? - Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 17:17, 11 June 2023 (UTC)

You want it to say "Short descriptions provide: ... a short description"? That would be worse. See WP:SDCONTENT, where it says "short descriptions are ... not [meant] to define the subject." And WP:SDNOTDEF, which says "A short description is not a definition, and editors should not attempt to define the article's subject nor to summarise the lead."

There may be a way to improve the bulleted text, but it needs to match the actual purposes of a short description as described on this page. – Jonesey95 (talk) 21:32, 11 June 2023 (UTC)

Actually, now that I think about it, do you know whether there is a meaningful difference between "a very brief indication of the field covered by the article" and "a short descriptive annotation"? If not, can those two bullet points be combined to say "a very short statement of the subject of the article"? - Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 22:40, 11 June 2023 (UTC)

That would be worse. "Annotation" means "A critical or explanatory commentary or analysis; A comment added to a text". When seen by a reader, the short description 'annotates' either the titles in a list, or the main body of text. The word "annotation" is intentionally and rightly used, in a separate bullet point from "a very brief indication of the field covered by the article". I think you may be confusing "annotation" with "summary" which means something quite different: "An abstract or a condensed presentation of the substance of a body of material." MichaelMaggs (talk) 08:31, 12 June 2023 (UTC)

In the article, "annotation" is modified by the adjective "descriptive." That makes me think that the meaning of "annotation" in this text is "A comment." And, put together, the two words mean "a descriptive comment." In other words, "a very short statement of the subject of the article."

This meaning seems to fit the Abraham Lincoln graphic that accompanies the text, for which the short description is "16th President of the United States" (since updated to "President of the United States from 1861 to 1865"), which contains no "critical or explanatory commentary or analysis."

Where am I going wrong with this analysis? - Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 15:49, 12 June 2023 (UTC)

I think you're trying hard to avoid the point that the SD in this context annotates either the titles in a list, or the main body of text. Merging bullet points as you suggest loses one of the stated purposes. MichaelMaggs (talk) 16:06, 12 June 2023 (UTC)

Thank you for helping to educate me. Would you please give me an example of an SD that annotates the titles in a list? - Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 01:40, 13 June 2023 (UTC)

Sure. See the three example images in the "Purposes" section. Each title in the list is annotated by its own short description. MichaelMaggs (talk) 08:51, 13 June 2023 (UTC)

Okay, so the first bullet point speaks to the use of SDs in articles, the second one speaks to their use in lists other than searches, and the third one speaks to their use in search lists. Do I have that right? - Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 16:15, 13 June 2023 (UTC)

I'm afraid I don't think this line of questioning is going to end up improving the bulleted text. Sorry. MichaelMaggs (talk) 17:42, 13 June 2023 (UTC)

I suggest that the OP focus on adding SDs to a few hundred articles in order to gain a better understanding of what they are and how they work here on Wikipedia. Biographies are always a good place to start. See the archives of this page for a discussion about how to find biographies that need SDs. – Jonesey95 (talk) 20:01, 13 June 2023 (UTC)

@MichaelMaggs and @Jonesey95 - Thank you for your time. While this conversation is at an end, I do hope that you will consider the possibility that what seems obvious to you may not seem obvious to an editor who has not added SDs to a few hundred articles. See Curse of knowledge. And, if you do that, I hope you will look at Wikipedia:Short description#Purposes with an eye toward making it clearer to the uninitiated what separates the second bullet point from the first and third bullet points. - Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 04:42, 14 June 2023 (UTC)

If you are noticing that short descriptions have enlarged text (not their normal styling), please note there appears to be some testing occurring that is affecting the gadget Shortdesc helper. You can find more info here: Wikipedia_talk:Shortdesc_helper#Short_descriptions_lost_their_styling. - Favre1fan93 (talk) 16:07, 15 June 2023 (UTC)

Hello! I'm not sure if this is the correct place for this, but I've noticed while working on some articles that several short descriptions for Brazilian municipalities use the following format "Municipality in REGION, Brazil". This can be seen in the following articles: São Gabriel da Cachoeira, Tabatinga, Petropolis, etc... While not incorrect, this would be like the Chicago article being "City in Midwest, United States" or the San Francisco article being "City in West Coast, United States". I think these short descriptions are autogenerated from pulling the subdivision_type1 field from the settlement infobox template. I propose instead that it should use the subdivision_type2 field, so that it uses the state that the municipality is located in. BaduFerreira (talk) 14:14, 16 June 2023 (UTC)

@BaduFerreira, I think the issue you raise is better discussed at Template_talk:Infobox_settlement, since it is {{Infobox settlement}} that automatically generates the short description.  — Archer1234 (t·c) 14:37, 16 June 2023 (UTC)

Oh okay, thank you for that insight. I'll move over there. BaduFerreira (talk) 14:42, 16 June 2023 (UTC)

In Dec 2022 I extended the previous code to exclude categories for more namespaces, see here. I suspect that the current code is inefficient, and could be streamlined e.g. using {{Main other}} by someone who is better than me with templates. – Fayenatic London 07:48, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

What output or symptoms make you think that there is inefficiency? The current code uses a switch statement. I haven't analyzed it, but using {{Namespace detect}} might make the code more easily readable, if the options available in that template are compatible with the list of namespaces that we want to exclude or include. – Jonesey95 (talk) 16:22, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

Project members may be interested in this announcement. The WMF seems to be bypassing our SD systems once again, but this time instead of Wikidata they have machines. Certes (talk) 12:24, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

No that's not the case, the machine assists in helping users add short descriptions, as the project mentions "Article descriptions go to Wikidata with the exception of article descriptions for English Wikipedia". The machine generates descriptions to help people add short descriptions through the Android app. Galobtter (talk) 12:45, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

That's some relief, though I am still concerned that inexperienced contributors with as few as three edits might be confused and encouraged to rubber-stamp inappropriate machine-generated suggestions accidentally. Certes (talk) 13:01, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

The short machine-assisted descriptors should not include mention of Wikidata. Many short descriptors do, and these should be removed. Thanks. Randy Kryn (talk) 13:37, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

Is this the gizmo the tags SD edits with #machine-suggestion? — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 19:08, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

I've found myself writing some SDs that turn out to be just over 40 characters, and wonder is there's a consensus for (a) use punctuation or abbreviations to drag the text back into compliance or (b) leave it spelled out for improved readability. Often I'm looking at the word "and" as dispensable. Examples of 41-character originals:

• "19th-century French lawyer and politician" -> "19th-century French lawyer & politician"
• "German novelist and dramatist (1837-1911)" -> "German novelist/dramatist (1837-1911)"
• "19th-century French lawyer and politician" -> "19th-century French lawyer-politician"

Thoughts? David Brooks (talk) 03:10, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

If length is a concern to that extent, SDDATES would support excluding the dates in favour of information deemed more important. Nikkimaria (talk) 03:22, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

@DavidBrooks, the 40 character limit is not a hard limit. Going just over it is fine, and I would avoid using punctuation like this. — Qwerfjkltalk 07:08, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

Agree with both of the above comments. Also, per WP:SDDATES, "For historical biographies, specific dates such as "1750–1810" are preferred over "18th-century" for clarity." MichaelMaggs (talk) 08:34, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

Thanks all. @Nikkimaria: That's an important caveat. I have been indiscriminately adding date ranges to bio articles I come across, and now realize 12 characters is a large part of the budget. I had not fully taken SDDATES on board; it is a judgement call based on intuiting the needs of the consumer of the SD, and I'll be more mindful. @MichaelMaggs: I had written a bunch in the century style before I had read SDDATE; now I only use it for medieval figures whose dates are uncertain. Another issue is the slight mental effort often needed to convert "18th" to "1700s". @Qwerfjkl: Got it: readability over brevity in edge cases. Again, I'll try to intuit the needs when the description is presented. David Brooks (talk) 14:09, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

In the extremely rare instance that a 42-character description like "19th-century French lawyer and politician" is truncated, it might read something like "19th-century French lawyer and pol...", which is still perfectly fine for distinguishing the subject of the article from a Dutch footballer or an Algerian professor. For the vast majority of the rest of the time, "19th-century French lawyer and politician" is much better than using an ampersand. Please don't get overly hung up on the 40-character recommendation. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:58, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

My suggestion is to change the formate from:

Ex:President of the United States from 1953 to 1961

to

Ex:34th President of the United States (1953-1961)

this will make it easier to distinguish and classify each president, while stating the number of presidency without removing the years served in office V.B.Speranza (talk) 20:55, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

The range of years is quite enough. Each president has a unique range of years, unless there should be two consecutive presidents who each serve for less than a year. United States President, 1953 to 1961 (37 characters) is shorter than President of the United States from 1953 to 1961 (48) and so is even better — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 21:12, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

I agree; the range of years is clear, succinct, and short. Drdpw (talk) 21:35, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

And even if you have two consecutive presidents in the same year, "United States President, Jan to May 2057" and "United States President, May to Oct 2057" are only 43 characters each. VanIsaac, GHTV ^cont_WpWS 21:44, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

... and United States President, May–Oct 2057 would be shorter. I assume that we can await the events of 2057 and debate the issue then — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 21:57, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

Per WP:SDDATES, dates in brackets are used to signify lifetimes not periods in office, so should be avoided here. Personally, I wouldn't bother with the president's number, but I know that Americans often like to quote it. You could use 34th United States President, 1953 to 1961 (42 characters, still reasonable). MichaelMaggs (talk) 07:52, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

I agree with your suggestion V.B.Speranza (talk) 08:37, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

I often change descriptions of pages to short descriptions which match those of similar pages. For example, most of the economic overview pages, as without descriptions, it renders an unsightly appearance to their display in Wikipedia's own app, despite most of these pages being some of the largest pages on Wikipedia. I'm not quite sure why there is a need to keep these pages without description, as it simply gives such pages an unfinished, unpolished, early 2000s Newgrounds-esque look. I was told to start this discussion by user Belbury. Frankly, I'm also not sure why user Belbury seems to care very much about the wiki page for the economy of the tiny nation of Qatar and other Persian Gulf microstates, but is perfectly alright with the exact same description fitting that of far larger wikipages, such as that of the economies of the United States and China. TitleEditor (talk) 01:23, 31 July 2023 (UTC)

You do not reference any specific articles, but your talk page has various comments about WP:SDDUPLICATE and WP:SDNONE. The Short description is displayed under the article title in searches and when adding links using some of the editors. The SD should not just repeat the article title and should generally avoid reusing words already in the article title. If a SD then does not add anything helpful, it is often best to set it to none. If a SD is already set to none, then it is generally best to leave it alone. For example: you recently changed the SD of Economy of Saudi Arabia from none to National economy of Saudi Arabia. Changes of this sort are quite pointless — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 09:02, 31 July 2023 (UTC)

Furthermore, I’d like to point out that this hasn’t been an issue for any of the far larger pages I’ve looked at, such as the economies of the United States and China descriptions. TitleEditor (talk) 01:36, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

User:TitleEditor, you stated "I often change descriptions of pages to short descriptions which match those of similar pages." Since WP:SDNONE is clear that those SDs should be None and not a repeat of the article's title, those articles that didn't have None, it might've been better if you had switched them to None as opposed to the other way around. Those 2 examples you gave at Economy of China and Economy of the United States are now Nones. There isn't a force out there enforcing SD Nones so there are bound to be several articles that never got changed in the first place and there are articles that had been changed to None that got changed back and it never got noticed. So, yes, there will be articles that don't follow SDNONE. Masterhatch (talk) 14:30, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

Ah, you misunderstand me. I believe that the standard is a bad standard, and should be changed for aesthetic reasons that very much impact the app and have close to no impact on desktop performance. TitleEditor (talk) 01:34, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

You described the lack of short descriptions as "unsightly". If this goes beyond the fact that they do not have a short description, it would be helpful if you provided a screenshot so we can see if there's merit to this position. Otherwise, per WP:SDNONE, something like Economy of Saudi Arabia doesn't require a short description since it is clear what it refers to. Generally, we tend to assume that for "X of Y" articles, where Y is a sovereign country, no short description is required. If Y was a sub-national entity, then it might help to have a short description to clarify the country it is in, but that's not the case here. -- Patar knight - ^chat/_{contributions} 14:55, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

I have been told any number of times not to write "America" when I am referring to the USA, as America is a continent whereas United States is a single country. I accordingly reverted a number of edits to short descriptions from American ultra-low-cost airline to Ultra-low-cost airline of the United States but then User:BilCat (who clearly has a strong opinion in the matter, refer to their user page) re-reverted. I do not feel strongly either way, but I would like to know if there is an official policy. Thanks,  Mr.choppers | ✎  13:19, 10 August 2023 (UTC)

"American" is the standard demonym and adjective in English for something or something from or related to the US. You are correct that we don't write "America" for the country itself, but that doesn't apply to "American". BilCat (talk) 13:24, 10 August 2023 (UTC)

"American" (8 characters) is usually better as it is much shorter than "of the United States" (20 characters). Excess characters in the short description should be avoided. MichaelMaggs (talk) 16:17, 10 August 2023 (UTC)

Thanks,  Mr.choppers | ✎  19:48, 10 August 2023 (UTC)

American is normally fine for short descriptions unless there is some reason to use "United States" such as for places (e.g. X in City, State, United States) or as part of a proper noun (e.g. United States Air Force officer, Rule in the United States Senate) -- Patar knight - ^chat/_{contributions} 21:21, 10 August 2023 (UTC)

There is a discussion here and here that may be of interest to this wikiproject. (In summary, this concerns "matching" of enwiki short descriptions and wikidata item descriptions.) Cheers, Cl3phact0 (talk) 17:07, 10 August 2023 (UTC)

Matching of SDs between Wikidata and en.WP is not a concern. That's why Category:Short description is different from Wikidata says "No action is needed at this time. This is a tracking category only." – Jonesey95 (talk) 18:27, 10 August 2023 (UTC)

Wikidata descriptions and English language Wikipedia short descriptions serve different purposes, and different rules apply. There's no problem with them being different, and indeed they very often are. MichaelMaggs (talk) 18:38, 10 August 2023 (UTC)

Thank you, Jonesey95 and MichaelMaggs. As "matches" seemed far more orderly than "is different from", my symmetry-seeking instinct seems to have led me astray in a futile search for Unobtainium. I'll stop looking and concern myself with other matters (although the sub-question re: Hyphens vs. En dashes may be relevant elsewhere). Cheers, Cl3phact0 (talk) 11:30, 11 August 2023 (UTC)

Editors might be interested in this WMF proposal to suggest machine-created draft short descriptions to Wikipedia app users: Wikipedia:Village_pump_(WMF)#Volunteer_Opportunity:_Join_the_Machine-Assisted_Article_Descriptions_Project_for_the_English_Wikipedia_App!. I have encouraged the team to come here and discuss their ideas. I'm specifically concerned that they have made a choice to rename "Short descriptions" as "Article descriptions", which is not what they are known as here, and that they are applying a common approach to all languages which does't fit with our guidance. MichaelMaggs (talk) 10:55, 18 August 2023 (UTC)

Wow, that tool is very bad at suggesting short descriptions for the English Wikipedia. I left some detailed feedback on the VPWMF page. Thanks for the link. – Jonesey95 (talk) 13:54, 18 August 2023 (UTC)

Template:Surname is currently transcluding Category:Pages with short description instead of Category:Articles with short description‎. That category is slowly going to fill up with tens of thousands of name articles, but where has that change actually been made, and is it correct to do so? —Xezbeth (talk) 06:38, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

@Mr. Stradivarius: Could your recent edits at Module:Pagetype have affected what {{Short description}} outputs? Previewing an edit of Adams (surname) after inserting {{#invoke:pagetype|main}} showed the result is "page". Johnuniq (talk) 07:30, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

@Xezbeth and Johnuniq: Yes, it is my recent change to Module:Pagetype that has caused this behaviour. The module now detects disambiguation pages using Module:Disambiguation, and Template:Surname is one of the templates that Module:Disambiguation looks for when deciding whether something is a disambiguation page or not. If it is desirable to turn this detection off in this case, then you can pass the argument |dab=no to the {{pagetype}} invocation inside Template:Short description. Or I see that Template:Short description also has a |pagetype= parameter that can be called from Template:Surname. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 13:06, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

I think I have fixed it in Template:Surname, per Mr. S's suggestion above. It will take a few hours or days for the category to clear of these articles. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:55, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

Even after adjusting {{surname}} and {{given name}}, pages like Alyakhnovich, where there is a manually placed short description template, are still being assigned to the "Pages" category. We need a fix or a revert in a different location. – Jonesey95 (talk) 17:58, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

After a bunch of null edits, we are back down to about 1,800 pages in the "Pages" category, nearly all of which are in article space, and many of which are also in the "Articles" category. Should any of them actually be in this category? There are at least two things that need to be fixed here, it seems to me. – Jonesey95 (talk) 21:01, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

We're also getting a small number of fictional characters with a similar problem, such as Duffy (Casualty) and Abby (The Last of Us). They use {{Infobox character}}, recently tagged as being considered for merging. Certes (talk) 23:34, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

@Certes: This looks like a false positive by Module:Disambiguation. The invocation of {{italic disambiguation}} on those pages matches the module's pattern of [%w_%s]-%f[%w][Dd]isam[%w]-. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 02:06, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

I have raised the issue here. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 02:11, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

Thanks; those characters are now Articles with short description. However, they're also still Pages with short description; is that correct? Certes (talk) 10:32, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

I adjusted the infobox code to force "Articles", but the Dab module code is still applying "Pages", I think. – Jonesey95 (talk) 13:09, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

Recent changes to Module:Disambiguation mean that pages containing {{dab}} or {{disambiguation}} are now categorised as dabs, even if the template is commented out. I've removed a commented dab template from Interstate 90, which fixed its SD category. It was inserted to pretend to Popups that the article is a dab, to ease diversion of incoming links to subtopics such as Interstate 90 in Washington. There are similar commented templates in Interstate 10, Interstate 70, Interstate 95, U.S. Route 6, U.S. Route 24, U.S. Route 34, U.S. Route 36 and U.S. Route 50. Should I simply remove these, or would it be better to have the module check that the template is not commented out? Courtesy ping: NE2. Certes (talk) 23:50, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

If a change to a module means that a commented template is breaking categorization, I think that module change needs to be fixed or reverted. – Jonesey95 (talk) 06:46, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

Resolved

Any idea why Haiku PackageInstaller currently has the locally-defined short description of 'Football club'? Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 19:55, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

Because it's using Template:Infobox football club. Hyphenation Expert (talk) 19:59, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

 Fixed. Strange. – Jonesey95 (talk) 21:18, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

The "See also" section of an article makes it blindingly obvious that the use of annotated links is one of the worst ideas ever:

• Conversion between quaternions and Euler angles – Mathematical strategy
• Dual quaternion – eight-dimensional algebra over the real numbers
• Dual-complex number – Four-dimensional algebra over the real numbers
• Exterior algebra – Algebra of exterior/ wedge products
• Hurwitz quaternion order
• Hyperbolic quaternion – Mutation of quaternions where unit vectors square to +1
• Lénárt sphere – educational model for spherical geometry
• Pauli matrices – Matrices important in quantum mechanics and the study of spin
• Quaternionic manifold
• Quaternionic matrix – matrix whose entries are quaternions
• Quaternionic polytope
• Quaternionic projective space – Concept in mathematics
• Rotations in 4-dimensional Euclidean space – Special orthogonal group
• Slerp – Spherical linear interpolation in computer graphics
• Split-quaternion – Four-dimensional associative algebra over the reals
• Tesseract – Four-dimensional analogue of the cube

After the dash some of these descriptions begin with a capital letter and some lower-case. How does one correct the discrepancy? By taking a few seconds to edit this section? No, you have to edit every one of the articles whose short descriptions appear here. And then someone comes along and adds another link. 98.61.211.100 (talk) 00:39, 5 October 2023 (UTC)

I think you may be looking for Template talk:Annotated link. – Jonesey95 (talk) 04:10, 5 October 2023 (UTC)

The short description helper described on this page makes it pretty easy to fix these. I tidied up the cases in the ones listed at Quaternion, which appears to be the source of the list above, in a couple of minutes. If you just don't like {{Annotated link}}, though, this talk page is not the place for complaints about it. – Jonesey95 (talk) 04:28, 5 October 2023 (UTC)

Why is Category:Articles with no short description empty? a455bcd9 (Antoine) (talk) 10:46, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

Because nobody has figured out a way to populate it. Did you ask its creator, Huggums537, what their plan was? – Jonesey95 (talk) 12:39, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

Got it, thanks. We should maybe delete it then. a455bcd9 (Antoine) (talk) 12:44, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

You can delete it with no objection from me. My activity on Wiki has been extremely limited in recent months and I have no immediate plans for this. Everything I had planned for Wikipedia is currently staged on the back burner at the moment outside of one silly discussion I'm currently involved in. Thanks. Huggums537 (talk) 14:47, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

There never was a need for the cat – it just described a negative that is easy via a search -incategory:"Articles with short description" -incategory:"All disambiguation pages" — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 14:04, 22 October 2023 (UTC)

Hi. Can someone clarify how Category:Short description is different from Wikidata is being populated?l, please? I've checked the source code of Template:Short description but it doesn't seem to be doing it. fgnievinski (talk) 04:15, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

{{SDcat}}. – Jonesey95 (talk) 05:31, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

Thank you! fgnievinski (talk) 04:11, 27 October 2023 (UTC)