Hey!

Thanks for sending this. This issue has been noticed and discussed previously in T97566. I'd encourage reading that task for a bit more background on the previous discussion.

Wikidata descriptions are used outside Wikidata in a few different places to provide users with short, brief additional context, such as search interface in the Wikipedia apps and the mobile interface for Wikimedia projects, and such usage instructions are typically not helpful outside Wikidata. Q503 is my perennial example. :-)

I believe some analysis was done in the past that determined that the number of items that this problem affects is relatively small, with only around 100 items being affected. That said, I think it's still a problem worth addressing.

Thanks,

Dan

On 5 November 2015 at 01:51, James Heald <j.heald@ucl.ac.uk> wrote:

I have been wondering about the practice of putting use-notes in item descriptions.

For example, on Q6581097 (male)
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q6581097
the (English) description reads:
"human who is male (use with Property:P21 sex or gender). For groups of males use with subclass of (P279)."

I have added some myself recently, working on items in the administrative structure of the UK -- for example on Q23112 (Cambridgeshire)
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q23112
I have changed the description to now read
"ceremonial county of England (use Q21272276 for administrative non-metropolitan county)"

These "use-notes" are similar to the disambiguating hat-notes often found at the top of articles on en-wiki and others; and just as those hat-notes can be useful on wikis, so such use-notes can be very useful on Wikidata, for example in the context of a search, or a drop-down menu.

But...

Given that the label field is also there to be presentable to end-users in contexts outside Wikidata, (eg to augment searches on main wikis, or to feed into the semantic web, to end up being used in who-knows-what different ways), yet away from Wikidata a string like "Q21272276" will typically have no meaning. Indeed there may not even be any distinct thing corresponding to it. (Q21272276 has no separate en-wiki article, for example).

So I'm wondering whether these rather Wikidata-specific use notes do really belong in the general description field ?

Is there a case for moving them to a new separate use-note field created for them?

The software could be adjusted to include such a field in search results and drop-downs and the item summary, but they would be a separate data-entry field on the item page, and a separate triple for the SPARQL service, leaving the description field clean of Wikidata-specific meaning, better for third-party and downstream applications.

Am I right to feel that the present situation of just chucking everything into the description field doesn't seem quite right, and we ought to take a step forward from it?

-- James.

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Dan Garry

Lead Product Manager, Discovery

Wikimedia Foundation