I am not sure if this has been discussed on-site, if so, apologies.
Many items on Wikidata do not have a short description. That's not really an issue if you look at a single item, but for item lists (e.g. search results) or "predictive search" drop-down boxes, descriptions can be quite helpful.
I believe that, for items that have basic claims/statements, short descriptions can be generated automatically, for supported languages. If we have "person", "Belgian", "painter", and birth/death year, a sentence like "Belgian painter (1900-2000)" can be constructed. Some awards (Nobel prize, Victoria cross, etc.) could be added.
That would require a lot of language-specific hacking (e.g. "Nationality: Belgium" => "Belgian"). So, if this would be a useful feature, should this be done * in PHP, pre-computed on every change to the item * in PHP, on-the-fly * in JavaScript, on-the-fly JavaScript would probably be the most flexible solution, but might be too slow (round-trip for multiple items, property names, etc.).
Your thoughts please!
Magnus