On 09.02.2015 11:41, Magnus Manske wrote:
Manual descriptions are, in the vast majority of cases, a waste of volunteer time. Alternative: http://magnusmanske.de/wordpress/?p=265
I am slightly concerned for the external data users (which I am too). Descriptions are very useful to have in the data dumps. I don't mind if they are auto-generated or written by humans, but I am worried that I would have to go to a web service for fetching all them, which seems a lot of work and very time consuming if you do it on the data dump scale. It may not even be possilbe in all (offline) contexts where dumps can be used.
More generally, switching from "we provide the data" to "we provide some data and a list of web services that you need to query to get the rest" seems to be a change of paradigm that I am not entirely happy with. Just consider how much data we import that is generated automatically -- should we in all of this cases switch to offering a web service that gives you the data if you really need?
So, +1 for auto-generated descriptions, but -1 for not having them in the data anymore.
Cheers,
Markus