S,
No, the RESTBase mobileapps service[1] doesn't do this currently. That
should be possible, though.
The service currently uses action=mobileview under the hood. This means it
gets it first from the WP instances, and it that one doesn't have it it
would go to Wikidata.
In the future we'll likely switch to Parsoid for the backend requests but I
don't know when that will happen. We then might have to request the
description using something like
action=query&prop=pageterms&wbptterms=description[1] if that's not included
in Parsoid.
[1]
Bernd
On Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 4:56 PM, S Page <spage(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
On Sat, Aug 15, 2015 at 5:08 AM, Magnus Manske <
magnusmanske(a)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