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@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.

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