I am not sure if this has been discussed on-site, if so, apologies.
Many items on Wikidata do not have a short description. That's not really
an issue if you look at a single item, but for item lists (e.g. search
results) or "predictive search" drop-down boxes, descriptions can be quite
helpful.
I believe that, for items that have basic claims/statements, short
descriptions can be generated automatically, for supported languages. If we
have "person", "Belgian", "painter", and birth/death year, a sentence like
"Belgian painter (1900-2000)" can be constructed. Some awards (Nobel prize,
Victoria cross, etc.) could be added.
That would require a lot of language-specific hacking (e.g. "Nationality:
Belgium" => "Belgian"). So, if this would be a useful feature, should this
be done
* in PHP, pre-computed on every change to the item
* in PHP, on-the-fly
* in JavaScript, on-the-fly
JavaScript would probably be the most flexible solution, but might be too
slow (round-trip for multiple items, property names, etc.).
Your thoughts please!
Magnus