On Sat, Aug 15, 2015 at 5:08 AM, Magnus Manske <magnusmanske@googlemail.com> wrote:

Ah, but when auto-descriptions get better, how do we know which should be updated, and which have been "improved" bu humans? Because people will screem bloody murder if we replace "their" descriptions with automatic ones, even if those are better.

Would it be acceptable to *generate* a description on the fly if there isn't a description in the user's language, but never *replace* an existing description in Wikidata?

AIUI this is what RESTBase is good at: in response to API requests for information about a page, some backend generates information, RESTBase caches it for future requests but RESTBase doesn't update the content databases. If I'm right (unlikely :-) ), then the upcoming MobileApps service could do this without anyone screaming.

Maybe the MobileApps service already does this, I'm not sure what https://restbase.wikimedia.org/en.wikipedia.org/v1/page/mobile-text/Cat puts in the "description" field if Wikidata's description is empty.

figuring out which descriptions we can overwrite is next-to-impossible.

So don't try. The game becomes: present the generated description next to the manual Wikidata description, and if enough users prefer the former, blank out the Wikidata description.

Cheers,

=S Page WMF Tech writer