IMO, if the goal is quality, then human curated descriptions are superior until such time as the auto-generation script passes the Turing test ;) 

I see these empty descriptions as an amazing opportunity to give *everyone* an easy new way to edit. I whipped an app editing interface up at the Lyon hackathon:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VblyGhf_c8

I used it to add a couple hundred descriptions in a single day just by hitting "random" then adding descriptions for articles which didn't have them.

I'd love to try a limited test of this in production to get a sense for how effective human curation can be if the interface is easy to use...

On Tue, Aug 18, 2015 at 1:25 PM, Jan Ainali <jan.ainali@wikimedia.se> wrote:

Nice one! 

Does not appear to work on svwiki though. Does it have something to do with that the wiki in question does not display that tagline?

Med vänliga hälsningar,
Jan Ainali

Verksamhetschef, Wikimedia Sverige 
0729 - 67 29 48

Tänk dig en värld där varje människa har fri tillgång till mänsklighetens samlade kunskap. Det är det vi gör.

Bli medlem.

2015-08-18 17:23 GMT+02:00 Magnus Manske <magnusmanske@googlemail.com>:

Show automatic description underneath "From Wikipedia...":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Magnus_Manske/autodesc.js

To use, add:
importScript ( 'User:Magnus_Manske/autodesc.js' ) ;

to your common.js

On Tue, Aug 18, 2015 at 9:47 AM Jane Darnell <jane023@gmail.com> wrote:

It would be even better if this (short: 3 field max) pipe-separated list was available as a gadget to wikidatans on Wikipedia (like me). I can't see if a page I am on has an "instance of" (though it should) and I can see the description thanks to another gadget (sorry no idea which one that is). Often I will update empty descriptions, but if I was served basic fields (so for a painting, the creator field), I would click through to update that too.

On Tue, Aug 18, 2015 at 9:58 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo) <nemowiki@gmail.com> wrote:

Jane Darnell, 15/08/2015 08:53:

Yes but even if the descriptions were just the contents of fields
separated by a pipe it would be better than nothing.

+1, item descriptions are mostly useless in my experience.

As for "get into production on Wikipedia" I don't know what it means, I certainly don't like 1) mobile-specific features, 2) overriding existing manually curated content; but it's good to 3) fill gaps. Mobile folks often do (1) and (2), if they *instead* did (3) I'd be very happy. :)

Nemo

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