Since there are some really good tools being written lately, I thought I'd throw up a request for one. :) This one would be quite easy to make, I think. Just saves some typing. (I would like it for en.wp but I think it would be pretty easy to make for any language.wp.)
Articles on Commons frequently have no contextual information - just a heading and images. Sometimes this is OK but usually short description blurbs and interwiki links would be better. The easiest way to make these is to find the en.wp article, copy the list of interwiki links, add the English interwiki link, then convert these to description tags and either leave just the article name as the description, or add the first sentence from the article.
e.g. today I fixed up this: http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Arthur%27s_Seat&oldid=172...
The description tags look like this:
{{en|This is where the first line of the article would go.}}
not a far leap from [[en:article name]] at all, really. You can also link to the WP article in the description tag, or bold the subject, or do neither.
Typically I only put the full description for English because I'm usually fixing up other people's articles, then I just put the article name for the other interwiki links _if it differs to the English name_. For example with species, quite a few wikis put them at the Latin binomial name (as does Commons), so I don't think it's necessary to list 50 "translations" of a word that already appears on the page.
as an example see http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Alaskan_Malamute , where I have only translated the labels that are not 'Alaskan Malamute' (in this case they are different scripts).
Anyway does what I've described make sense? Basically I'd like to put in the name of the relevant en.wp article, and get out the description tags and interwiki links that I can paste right into my Commons article.
Not at all urgent, of course...
cheers, Brianna
-- "Mathematicians do it with Nobel's wife."