What was the involvement of the Discovery team, which runs innovation
around our search systems, in this decision?

On 28 October 2015 at 22:50, Jon Katz <jkatz@wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> TLDR: on the mobile web, Wikidata descriptions will appear under article
> titles in search results, nearby and watchlist starting tomorrow afternoon
> (Thu, Oct 29) across projects.  A 'kill switch' has been implemented so
> that this feature can be turned off if necessary.
>
> Background:
> In Q2 of last year, Wikidata descriptions were added to both our official
> apps: iOS and Android and resulted in wonderful qualitative feedback (as
> the discovery team knows, it is hard to define 'success' with search (fewer
> searches, more searches?).  Though moving Wikidata descriptions to search
> on mobile web was planned for Q3 of last year, it has been sitting in beta
> for many months as there was some concern that at scale on the web, it
> might prove to be an incentive to vandalize Wikidata (and article editors
> would not have an obvious, wikipedia way to undo such edits).
>
> Ultimately, we think that anything showing up on Wikipedia should be
> editable ON Wikipedia. Wikidata description editing is something we are
> going to aim for. Given the success of descriptions in search results on
> apps, we would rather move forward with the presentation and work towards a
> goal of editing in-line than to hold up the entire thing based on a fear
> that might not be warranted. In consultation with the Wikidata team, we
> decided to move forward with pushing the feature to stable as long as we
> had the ability to pull the feature back if there were any issues.
>
> We are relying on community feedback to let us know if you have any issues
> or hear from anyone that this is causing problems. Our community liaison
> team will be posting notices on village pumps shortly. Thanks!
>
> Best,
>
> Jon
> WMF Reading Product Lead

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--
Oliver Keyes
Count Logula
Wikimedia Foundation

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