My previous reply was partial and accidentally sent - here's my actual reply :)




On Sun, Mar 22, 2015 at 1:53 PM, Dmitry Brant <dbrant@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hi Lydia,

Indeed, there are many more Wikidata items than Wikipedia articles. However, the users of our mobile apps only see Wikipedia articles in our search results (at least for now), which means that they will only be able to contribute descriptions to Wikidata items for which a Wikipedia article exists.




They are also used in "Recent" and  "Nearby" and Vibha wants them in "Saved Pages" list as well. 



 
No doubt, the description field is an important component of each Wikidata entry.  But, when there is a corresponding Wikipedia article, why not query it to provide an automatic description? This could be based on the first sentence of the article, or a subset of the first sentence, or some other kind of metadata within the article.




Why not query it to provide an automatic description? Because finding the best subset of the first sentence(s) isn't all there is to it.

For example, take the enwiki "Fish" article.

The first couple sentences are these:

A fish is any member of a paraphyletic group of organisms that consist of all gill-bearing aquatic craniate animals that lack limbs with digits. Included in this definition are the living hagfish, lampreys, and cartilaginous and bony fish, as well as various extinct related groups.
 


So if the we reduce the description to its first sentence we have:

A fish is any member of a paraphyletic group of organisms that consist of all gill-bearing aquatic craniate animals that lack limbs with digits. 



Now, for the sake of argument, let's imagine the bold words below represent a best case scenario for a relevant subset of the first sentence:

A fish is any member of a paraphyletic group of organisms that consist of all gill-bearing aquatic craniate animals that lack limbs with digits. 



So, we have "A fish is a gill-bearing aquatic animal", or you could reduce it further to "a gill-bearing aquatic animal".


But reducing the first sentence in this way is deceptively complicated to do programmatically, precisely because of the word "arguably" in the preceding sentence - it's almost entirely a matter of qualitative judgement. You have to know what a fish is to know what parts of the first sentence are most important and then you have to know how to contextually stitch these words together according to rules of the language's grammar and syntax so they "read" nicely (see the word "a" and the "s" on the end of "animals"). 

Basically, great descriptions require a native speaker of the language with some skill at summarizing. This is such a low bar for humans that almost anyone could contribute quality descriptions.


But, If descriptions are not human editable, then we are stuck with the limitations of whatever heuristics are used to auto-generate the description.












 
The key is that the description would stay with the article, which would eliminate the need for duplication and synchronization.

So, in a sense, I would look at it the other way: descriptions within Wikipedia articles would be useful for Wikidata entries.

-Dmitry

On Sun, Mar 22, 2015 at 4:17 PM, Lydia Pintscher <lydia.pintscher@wikimedia.de> wrote:
On Sun, Mar 22, 2015 at 9:10 PM, Dmitry Brant <dbrant@wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Hi Jane,
>
> Perhaps my comments came off as more pessimistic than I intended. Of course
> I believe in the power of crowdsourcing, and I would never want to make
> anyone feel like their contributions are being marginalized.
>
> I'll agree for now that the idea of "fully" automated descriptions leans
> more towards science fiction than reality. :)
>
> However, my whole point has more to do with the apparent duplication of
> content that seems to be happening between the first sentence of Wikipedia
> articles and the corresponding Wikidata description.  There's something
> about it that seems unnecessary.  If we can figure out a way to
> automatically extract the description from the first sentence of the
> article, it would simplify things in two ways:
>
> 1) People wouldn't need to edit Wikidata descriptions, and would instead
> focus on improving the Wikipedia article.
> 2) People who monitor changes made to articles would need to monitor only
> the article, instead of the article plus its corresponding Wikidata
> description.

There are a lot more items on Wikidata than articles on Wikipedia. And
not every language has a Wikipedia article for each item. Don't just
look at descriptions on Wikidata as something useful for Wikipedia.
They're much more than that.


Cheers
Lydia

--
Lydia Pintscher - http://about.me/lydia.pintscher
Product Manager for Wikidata

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