Hoi, Sorry Charles, you lost me. When disambiguation is the name of the game, you probably only consider English whereas Wikidata items should have descriptions in all its languages. The notion of sitelinks was of interest only in the first few months because the wikidatification of sitelinks replaced a process full of issues to something that was not as complicated and more robust.
With "automated descriptions" we have functionality that changes the descriptions as items evolve. It is functionality that works in multiple languages and it has served us better than the existing descriptions. When "abstract descriptions" are fixed and serve us in supported languages it is a big advantage over English only. When the "abstract descriptions" are fixed and do not reflect the evolving content inherent in an item, "abstract descriptions" will not fully replace "automated descriptions".. When there is an update function things will be peachy. Thanks, Gerard
On Wed, 4 Aug 2021 at 13:38, Charles Matthews via Abstract-Wikipedia < abstract-wikipedia@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:
On 04 August 2021 at 11:24 Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
I do understand perfectly what has been said. However, the quality of Wikidata descriptions has been deficient when you compare it with the existing automated descriptions.
I guess there are at least two different views about Wikidata descriptions, and this debate can't really happen without some clarification.
What you can call the "historic view" dates from the time when Wikidata was defined by the interwiki graph. It is simple, and says that descriptions are just there to disambiguate, so that for example "disease" could be enough. When the item always has to have a sitelink, this could often be enough.
As we know, the scope of Wikidata was expanded - massively it turns out - by requiring only an external link. I don't know whether this step, around 2015?, was accompanied by a discussion of the new function of descriptions.
I think it is at least clear that descriptions then became more important.
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