I agree with Magnus that it should be Wikidata to
the rescue for problems
like these, not some new policy that throws current WP contributors into a
tizzy. I am not sure how precisely, but maybe if all parts of a lead
sentence were in Wikidata then one could then experiment with a new
Wikidata property for "Mobile lead" which could first be seeded with the
label and barring that the WP lead?
On Mon, Mar 9, 2015 at 12:47 PM, Amir E. Aharoni <
amir.aharoni(a)mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
I'll state a bunch of things that are obvious
to me, but should probably
be written down in some way...
IPA, other names, and names in other languages indeed make reading
harder. They are there because of a tradition. There's a tradition of
printing encyclopedia articles like this (that's also where the bold font
in each articles' first words comes from). Just open any printed
encyclopedia. It's a nice continuation of tradition, and Wikipedia takes it
to extremes thanks to the blessings of Unicode - old printed encyclopedias
were lucky to have Cyrillic characters in their typography, and some good
ones had IPA, Arabic, and Devanagari, but you won't find pervasive use of
Georgian or Kannada in a lot of printed encyclopedias. We have pretty much
everything in Wikipdeia. The information is valuable, but having it all in
parentheses in the first sentence begins to be non-practical.
It will help to at least be aware that a proposal to change this will
break with traditions; traditions must be treated with respect. But in the
21st century on the web it may make sense to transfer IPA and names in
other languages to the infobox. Other names in the same language will
probably have to stay in the opening sentence, because article naming is a
super-contentious issue.
And yes, the Foundation has no authority to just change it, because it's
a matter for the Manual of Style, which is owned by the community (in all
languages). As a member of the editing community, I would support it, and I
even mentioned it on mailing lists in the past (too busy to search where),
but it needs to go through proper discussion.
--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
2015-03-07 2:49 GMT+02:00 Dan Garry <dgarry(a)wikimedia.org>rg>:
(moving to mobile-l)
Thanks Vibha, this is really informative.
It's very clear that our first sentences really suck for supporting
quick lookup, primarily because their information hierarchy is all wrong.
That said, it's important to remember that we now have Wikidata
descriptions displayed in the apps for this exact reason: to let people
find out quickly and easily what something is.
So, although I agree that our first sentences are suboptimal, it's
important to put the problem in context and remember that users do have
Wikidata descriptions now to satisfy this use case. It's not like we're
totally failing them, we could just be doing a bit better.
Rather than piling on hacks by trying to scrape the content in the
first sentence and reorganise it (which causes information loss, and is
extremely fragile from a technological perspective), the long term solution
is, at least to me, to invest in is getting our engaged readers to write
clear, coherent Wikidata descriptions. These can then be used across all
platforms to support that workflow.
Of course, there may be room for some quick wins that we can put in
place while we figure out truly compelling UX for getting readers to submit
descriptions. We can explore those quick wins in our brainstorming session
on Monday. But we must remember that these will only be short-term, hacky
solutions to the problem, and that we need to address this problem at the
source in order to be really successful at it.
Thanks!
Dan
On 6 March 2015 at 16:13, Jon Robson <jrobson(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Any reason this is on mobile-tech and not mobile-l (I'd love to hear
> from people like Amir on this subject)? It would be good to flag this
> problem to a wider audience and part of our problem with most mobile issues
> is people just are not aware of this sort of thing. Many probably haven't
> even heard of the hemingway app...
>
> It would be interesting to see how a wikidata generated first sentence
> would score with the same app.
>
> On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 at 3:54 PM, Vibha Bamba <vbamba(a)wikimedia.org>
> wrote:
>
>> Hi Folks,
>> Kaity and I used the Hemingway app <http://www.hemingwayapp.com/> to
>> analyze the readability of our first sentence, using a few articles. They
>> all scored poorly, an ideal grade level of 10 is recommended for clear bold
>> writing.
>>
>> This difficult problem arises from the first sentence containing one
>> or more of the following:
>>
>> - IPA Keys
>> - Birth/ death dates
>> - Other Names/ AKA's
>> - Help/info links
>> - Alternate spellings and scripts
>> - Additional details
>>
>> Details like dates are replicated in the infobox, if it exists in the
>> article.
>> Other templates such as AKA's/IPA's are extremely useful but need to
>> be presented in a clear and structured manner. Some of this comes from the
Manual
>> of style
>>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Lead_section#First_sentence>,
>> but it is abused in many cases.
>>
>> Its sad, because many readers come to Wikipedia to answer the 'What
>> is this/ who is this' question. Google Knowledge panel strips out all
>> brackets and presents important details as a list, under the description.
>>
>> We have started investigating solutions for this on mobile. I would
>> encourage you to try this out on mobile web or apps.
>>
>> Thanks
>> Vibha & Kaity
>>
>> ---
>>
>> Articles we used:
>> Bern <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bern>
>> Genghis Khan <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genghis_Khan>
>> Cephalopod <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cephalopod>
>> Mahatma Gandhi <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi>
>> Nietzsche <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche>
>> Carthage <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carthage>
>> Phoenicia <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenicia>
>> Timur <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timur>
>>
>>
>>
>> ----
>> Vibha Bamba
>> Senior Designer | WMF Design
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
--
Dan Garry
Associate Product Manager, Mobile Apps
Wikimedia Foundation
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