Manual descriptions are not an entire waste of time.
Magnus writes in his
post:
> And some people have seen my
Reasonator tool, where (for some item types, and some languages) rather long descriptions can be generated.
It's not necessary gd that they are long. For the mobile app it's better if they are short.
But the "some item types, and some languages" part is the real problem. Only some. It's quite possible that in the future Reasonator will cover all languages and all data types and will also be tweaked t provide appropriate length, maybe even different lengths according to context. Reasonator natural language sentence creation works for a very small number of languages. If it was as easy to translate it as it is to translate MediaWiki UI messages, I wouldn't object to its wider, but AFAIK this is not the case not.
And it's not that good for English either. Reasonator is not smart enough at the moment to describe people with several qualifications. The current Reasonator-generated description of
Peter Garrett is vastly inferior to the manually-written description. Compare:
1. "Australian singer and politician, Minister for School Education, Early Childhood and Youth, Minister for Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities (Australia), and Member of the Australian House of Representatives (*1953) ♂"
2. "Australian politician and Midnight Oil lead singer".
Basic human intuition tells me that for most Wikipedia readers, who simply want to know "Who is Peter Garrett?", #2 is far more useful. #1 has oversize descriptions of all his political roles, and
doesn't have the name the rock band that made him popular. This is just one example out of hundreds of thousands that could be brought up. For what it's worth, #2 is also easier to translate manually.
It's important to emphasize at this point that I have the utmost respect to Magnus's brilliant work. It's just not ready to completely replace the manual descriptions.
A practical solution for now is to have a system for manual translation of descriptions, which shows the Reasonator descriptions as a translation aid, similarly to how the Translate extension shows translation memory suggestions. Also, a way to manually tweak descriptions can take Reasonator further, for example a way to tell it that for the Peter Garrett item there's no need to include a long list of all his roles in the Australian government.
Oh, and even if you can run away some day from manually translating
descriptions, you cannot run away from manually translating labels. At
most, some can be copied from Wikipedia, but even then many of them need post-import fixing.