Thanks for your work including ULAN descriptions! I agree they are great. As for Monte's earlier response to Magnus's comment about people vs other stuff, I think that Monte's sample effort proves how much "headway" we have achieved on person-items and this is excellent to read. I am a big fan of enabling the crowd, and have been having fun with Magnus latest gadget that shows me the auto-description, which is of course most challenging when that is blank (no "instance of" property). I spent fifteen minutes trying on this one and couldn't think of anything better than "machine":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banknote_counter

I am just one Wikidatan but it would be great if others could also keep Wikidata in mind while browsing Wikipedia. Can we publish this gadget in all languages on Wikidata? Maybe we should create a project on Wikidata called "Wikipedia"?

On Thu, Aug 20, 2015 at 8:59 AM, Vladimir Alexiev <vladimir.alexiev@ontotext.com> wrote:
> The case is made often that descriptions as they exist are evil. They are atrocious
> Why do we not get rid of all that rubbish. [and replace with]
> Automated descriptions … can easily be improved upon in two ways ..

I agree in general, except for items that don’t have much data, e.g. person’s life years,
(Or have too much data that can’t be selected easily, e.g. 10 occupations but only 1 is really notable).
For people: I mostly copy the description from Getty ULAN: that’s very good, even if the life years are unknown (thus set too wide, or missing).

So my point is, there should also be an algorithm to decide whether to replace the manual description.

Why people invest time in writing “rubbish”: because there’s no worse description than a missing description.
Most everything should have an EN description, to allow a user to understand what that is, esp in an auto-complete list.
Even a very bad description usually allows that.



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