(moving to mobile-l)
Thanks Vibha, this is really informative.
It's very clear that our first sentences really suck for supporting quick lookup, primarily because their information hierarchy is all wrong. That said, it's important to remember that we now have Wikidata descriptions displayed in the apps for this exact reason: to let people find out quickly and easily what something is.
So, although I agree that our first sentences are suboptimal, it's important to put the problem in context and remember that users do have Wikidata descriptions now to satisfy this use case. It's not like we're totally failing them, we could just be doing a bit better.
Rather than piling on hacks by trying to scrape the content in the first sentence and reorganise it (which causes information loss, and is extremely fragile from a technological perspective), the long term solution is, at least to me, to invest in is getting our engaged readers to write clear, coherent Wikidata descriptions. These can then be used across all platforms to support that workflow.
Of course, there may be room for some quick wins that we can put in place while we figure out truly compelling UX for getting readers to submit descriptions. We can explore those quick wins in our brainstorming session on Monday. But we must remember that these will only be short-term, hacky solutions to the problem, and that we need to address this problem at the source in order to be really successful at it.
Thanks!
Dan