On Fri, Aug 21, 2015 at 11:21 AM, Jon Katz <jkatz@wikimedia.org> wrote:
To S's suggestion: what steps do we need to take to put autodesc into wiki's?

Noooo! Saying "put" or "store" produces resistance. This is about when and where to _display_ an AutoDesc that's generated on-the-fly from Wikidata. Caching it is an optimization detail. The second message in this thread said
Rather, cache [auto] descriptions separately, and update them as required
yet we keep reviving a dead horse.
  • establish consensus with stakeholders outside this thread?
I think the Reading team can decide to show the AutoDesc on lead images and in mobile search results when there's no Wikidata description.
  • create new field?
Never. Cache it in RESTBase.
  • rule out/protect against edge cases (are their length limits, for instance)
  • ways to edit (explaining to a user how they can edit or override is going to be important)
I think Monte's excellent prototype of editing descriptions on Mobile (T90765) should show the AutoDesc, as in "Try to write something better than this". However, Lydia Pintscher declined my T109772 "present the short AutoDesc of an item when editing its description", giving some cogent blockers.

If the AutoDesc is inaccurate solely because a fact in Wikidata is wrong, then the user should update the item in Wikidata rather than add a manual description. As Dimitry wrote
IMO, allowing the user to edit the description is a missed opportunity to make the user edit the actual *data*, such that the description is generated correctly.
I don't know if AutoDesc could link every piece of the description to the fact generating it.

Who should own it and create an epic to track?  Wikidata, Search, Reading?....

The CTO, i.e. bring it up at some Engineering management meeting.

Magnus Manske wrote:
So it turns out that ValterVBot alone has created over 1.8 MILLION "manual" descriptions. And there are other bots that do this. We already HAVE automatic descriptions, we just store them in the "manual" field.

The worst of both worlds.

The longer we go without a productized AutoDesc that's shown whenever there isn't a manual description, the more people will do this.

Regards,
--
=S Page  WMF Tech writer