I've seen arguments on both sides here. Some say automatically generated descriptions are not good enough. Some say they are. Why don't we gather some data on this and use that to decide what's right? :-)

Dan

On 14 Aug 2015 6:29 pm, "Dmitry Brant" <dbrant@wikimedia.org> wrote:
> The argument "not good enough" is a fail IMHO, though. If it's bad, improve the algorithm and/or add statements. If it's still bad, THEN add a manual description.

+10^100


On Fri, Aug 14, 2015 at 6:22 PM, Magnus Manske <magnusmanske@googlemail.com> wrote:


On Fri, Aug 14, 2015 at 9:54 PM Gergo Tisza <gtisza@wikimedia.org> wrote:

On Fri, Aug 14, 2015 at 10:31 AM, Magnus Manske <magnusmanske@googlemail.com> wrote:
IMHO the next step is auto-generating short descriptions from the item statements, which will be perfectly fine for the vast majority of cases.

The Wikidata team is not a fan of that idea: T91981 

Yes, sadly. The argument "not good enough" is a fail IMHO, though. If it's bad, improve the algorithm and/or add statements. If it's still bad, THEN add a manual description.

I think the worst possible description is the one that's missing.

Back-of-the-envelope calculation:
* We have ~45 million manual descriptions at the moment on Wikidata
* We have ~18 million items
* We have ~250 languages
That means that, as of this moment, less than 1% of all possible descriptions are filled in. And the quality of these manual descriptions is everyone's best guess; I've seen plenty "disambiguation page" and "category page", EVEN IS THAT IS NOT TRUE. Some crappy bot filled those in. No chance of quickly fixing this.

So, 99% descriptions missing, with little chance of them getting filled in at all (think: small languages), and a rather dubious track record for the ones that are.

It's like letting people drown in the Mediterranean because the tents to house them temporarily are "not good enough". Frustrating, seriously.

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Dmitry Brant
Mobile Apps Team (Android)
Wikimedia Foundation
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_mobile_engineering


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