User:RexxS/Short descriptions

I'll try to explain to you the reasons why the community decided to move the short descriptions from Wikidata to the English Wikipedia.

A team of developers at WMF decided it would be a good idea for articles to have a short description. That short description would be shown immediately below the article title when viewing the mobile site and when viewing the Wikipedia app; when searching for an article on mobile, it would also appear as the second line in the suggestions you get as you start typing into the search box. The idea was that it would help readers to be sure that they had arrived at the right page, or that it would help disambiguate similarly spelled articles when searching.

Unfortunately, they decided to take the content directly from the 'description' field on Wikidata. That produced three issues: (1) The 'description' field field is not able to be referenced, so we had content displayed that breached our WP:Verifiability policy. (2) Wikidata is notoriously prone to vandalism, so we can have content that is libellous or worse displayed on the English Wikipedia, with no obvious way for an editor here to fix it. Recently we had a complaint from an editor that the description for a well-known basketball player was "loves dick". That vandalism went unnoticed on Wikidata, and many editors would not know that they had to go to another site to fix a problem here. (3) Subtle vandalism like deliberately describing Bernie Sanders as a "Jewish politician" on Wikidata breaches our BLP policies on self-identification, which Wikidata lacks. That sort of description is acceptable there, but not here.

As a result of considerable outcry by the community against an unwelcome fait accompli, the WMF team agreed to turn off the descriptions from below the article title on the mobile site, but left them displaying in the app and in the search box. They also created a mechanism whereby editors on the English Wikipedia could make their own short descriptions locally, which would override the descriptions taken from Wikidata, thus returning control of what is displayed on the English Wikipedia to editors on the English Wikipedia. They also agreed to stop fetching the descriptions from Wikidata completely once 2,000,000 English Wikipedia articles has short descriptions provided locally.

Further discussions and an RfC followed here to clarify the means by which we would add these short descriptions to articles.


 * Incidents#Hard to detect mobile vandalism
 * Village pump (technical)#Discussion at ANI about Wikidata use in mobile view
 * Rfc: Remove description taken from Wikidata from mobile view of en-WP
 * Blockers to having short description on mobile
 * RfC: Populating article descriptions magic word
 * Wikipedia talk:Wikidata/2018 State of affairs
 * Template talk:Short description
 * Phabricator ticket T184000
 * Phabricator ticket T193857

Now, you may not think there's any problem with having unsourceable content in our articles; you may think there's no problem with vandalism on Wikidata; you may even think it's ok to describe a living person as "loves dick" or to describe someone who does not self-identify as a particular race or ethnicity. However, the community doesn't agree with any of that, and we are trying to circumvent those problems. So I'd be really grateful if you'd stop making our job harder by indiscriminately removing short description from articles for no very good reason at all.