Amir,
“some people are now thinking of undeploying the {{short description}} feature”
Who? Where is this being discussed? I am not sure what you mean by “undeploying the
feature”
Agree that it was a badly handled problem and massive time-sink, but would prefer that the
baby is not thrown out with the bathwater.
Cheers,
Peter
From: Abstract-Wikipedia [mailto:abstract-wikipedia-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf
Of Amir E. Aharoni
Sent: 29 July 2020 12:54
To: General public mailing list for the discussion of Abstract Wikipedia (aka Wikilambda)
Subject: Re: [Abstract-wikipedia] How to store wikitext along the structured content?
בתאריך יום ד׳, 29 ביולי 2020 ב-13:11 מאת Luca Martinelli
<martinelliluca@gmail.com>:
On Tue, 28 Jul 2020, 23:27 Denny Vrandečić, <dvrandecic(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hello all,
one early question we are currently debating is how to store Wikitext documentation
alongside with the structured data?
So, the label of the page and aliases and the actual content object are stored as JSON,
but then we would like to have the documentation be more or less normal wikitext.
(...)
The text "en:Multiplication is a mathematical operation that...", that's
just wikitext. And it is different per language.
(...)
So, if I get it right, that wikitext is basically the equivalent of a Wikidata item
description. Allow me to play dumb ("play"... heh), and ask: do we really need
that description to be wikitext or do we want it to be similar to a Wikidata item
description (i.e. similar to a caption)?
"Description" in Wikidata is a misnomer. It should have never been called
"description". It should have been called a "disambiguator", which is
its real purpose. The name "description" caused developers of several apps and
extensions to actually use them as summaries in search results, which in turn caused the
Wikidata-suspicious English Wikipedia community to ask for the weird {{short description}}
feature to override the Wikidata "description" (and to top things off, some
people are now thinking of undeploying the {{short description}} feature). It also caused
some Wikidatans to start thinking of some very technical syntax for writing descriptions.
I don't remember particular examples, but I do remember debates about writing very
technical, tight descriptions for biological species. Which is supposed to be very
pointless, because, um, Wikidata has properties for structured data.
Denny can correct me, but my memory tells me that Wikidata descriptions were made just for
disambiguation, like the parentheses part in "Georgia (U.S. state)" and
"Georgia (country)" in the English Wikipedia. They were made for items that have
a label that is identical to the label of another item. They have always been supposed to
be super-simple, optional and not even necessary in most items.
Documentation for code is completely different. It is needed more or less always, it can
be long, and it often needs rich formatting. So it should probably allow real wikitext, as
Denny suggests.
If I understand correctly, Wikilambda function are kind of similar to templates and
modules. Simpler templates have their documentation in the templates page itself, and the
more complicated ones have it in a /doc supbage. Templates can also have a bit of
documentation in the TemplateData description, but this is not supposed to be
comprehensive (and if I understand correctly, functions probably don't need something
like TemplateData because according to the current plan, Z Objects will provide similar
functionality in a more structured way).
Scribunto Modules are not wikitext, and they always have their documentation in a /doc
subpage.
If functions do something similar on a /doc subpage, it will be totally fine, at least as
a start. Occasionally there are suggestions to move TemplateData and template and module
documentation to MCR slots, and this is probably fine, but optional.
L.
_______________________________________________
Abstract-Wikipedia mailing list
Abstract-Wikipedia(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/abstract-wikipedia
<http://www.avg.com/email-signature?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=emailclient>
Virus-free.
<http://www.avg.com/email-signature?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=emailclient>
www.avg.com