Considering that "hardcoded" descriptions (written manually, or generated automatically) for all items in all ~290 languages would likely make up most of the data dump file, this seems somewhat impractical :-)

For "offline users", description dumps could be generated on a regular basis, if there is demand. 

On Mon Feb 09 2015 at 11:05:26 Markus Kroetzsch <markus.kroetzsch@tu-dresden.de> wrote:
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


>
--
Markus Kroetzsch
Faculty of Computer Science
Technische Universität Dresden
+49 351 463 38486
http://korrekt.org/


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