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Shortcuts WP:WPSHORTDESC WP:WPSD

WikiProject Short descriptions

Shortcuts	WP:WPSHORTDESC, WT:WPSHORTDESC (talk)
Categories	WikiProject Short descriptions, Pages with short description
Project banner template	((WikiProject Short descriptions))
Has goals?	Populate all articles with short descriptions, and improve existing descriptions

Some users are working on the top 3000 most viewed pages without short descriptions. Want to help? Contribute here!

This is a project to populate all Wikipedia mainspace articles with a suitable short description, and to improve existing descriptions.

There are a total of 6,813,939 content pages in the main namespace, of which 356,445 are disambiguation pages.

Out of 6,457,494 articles, 5,398,086 have a short description and 1,059,408 do not have a short description.

83.594% complete

This search finds all articles that have had the ((short description)) template added. The remaining descriptions are generated by infoboxes or other templates.

Recent progress

Graphs are unavailable due to technical issues. There is more info on Phabricator and on MediaWiki.org.

Note: The article counts prior to March 2023 are rounded values taken from Size of Wikipedia: The data set.

See checklists of current progress.

Short descriptions appear in Wikipedia mobile and some desktop searches, and help users identify the desired article. When viewing an article, some mobile Wikipedia Apps also display the description below the page title.

Articles that are lacking a short description appear in search result lists simply by their titles, with no annotation. If all titles were self-evidently clear, it would be immediately obvious which one relates to the article of interest, but very often that is not the case. Titles alone can be ambiguous or otherwise not comprehensible to non-specialist readers, as well as to readers who are not fluent speakers of English.

The easiest way to add and edit short descriptions on desktop is to make use of Shortdesc helper. Alternatively, in the source code editor insert the short description template to the very top of the page, above all other article headers and templates. The format to use is ((Short description|Your short description here)).

If a short description would be redundant you can use "none", thus: ((Short description|none)). See WP:SDNONE.

Short descriptions can be added and edited using the standard wiki markup editor (edit source), but it is often easier to enable Short description helper in Preferences | Gadgets, in the Editing section.

Editing using Shortdesc helper gadget

If you click on (Edit), (Add), (Import), or (Edit and Import), it should open a small editing window in the third line with the current short description and give the options (Save) and (Cancel). Edit will import the description from Wikidata and allow you to change it before saving, while Import will import the Wikidata description as is and save. It can be edited later. Edit and Import will open the edit window with the Wikidata description and allow you to edit it before clicking on (Save) or (Cancel).

If adding a new short description, either type it in from the keyboard, or drag and drop from the article text and edit as appropriate.

By default, adding short descriptions to an article also adds the description to Wikidata if Wikidata has no description. This can be changed in the settings. To edit a short description that is already on Wikidata, click on one of the links (not shown in this example) in the Wikidata item description or Q-number to open the item at Wikidata.

Difference in formatting conventions for the description:

• Wikidata: text always starting only with a lower case;
• Short description in Wikipedia pages: Sentence case: Text starting with a first letter in upper case.

When the description does not yet exist in Wikidata and one types all the text in lower case using Shortdesc helper, it sends the description in lower case to Wikidata while simultaneously formatting the short description of the Wikipedia page in Sentence case. However, when exporting a modified short description back to Wikidata, it is not the case. Then, it is necessary to manually edit the Wikidata description to change the first Uppercase letter of the sentence into a lower case.

The Shortdesc helper will provide a standardised edit summary describing the edit. A custom edit summary can be added using the "summary" button.

Other useful scripts

• The script User:SD0001/shortdescs-in-category shows the short descriptions of pages while viewing a category
• The SDlinkBuilder user script helps you build a TODO list - taking all of the article links in a page and showing their current short descriptions.

What if I want to see the text that is used on Wikidata?

Wikidata maintains its own texts which are not linked in any way with Wikipedia short descriptions (although Short description helper can display the Wikidata text to help editors construct a suitable description for Wikipedia). Wikipedia page Short descriptions and Wikidata item descriptions serve different purposes and are not required to be the same. If you want to view the Wikidata item description, you can:

• Configure Short description helper to show the Wikidata text at all times; or
• Click on the Wikidata link in the sidebar to go directly to Wikidata, where you can view and edit the information.

Neither the Wikidata item description nor the Wikipedia short description should give a definition of the subject covered by the article; see WP:SDNOTDEF and Wikidata:Help:Description#Descriptions are not definitions for more details.

As the short description is article content, any bot or template generated short description may be overridden with a better short description by an editor. If there is a dispute about whether the new description is better, discuss on the article's talk page. If the lead section of the article is so confused that it is not possible to work out what the article is about, leave an appropriate maintenance tag or, if you can, fix it yourself.

Auto-generated from infoboxes and other templates

Already done

To do next

• ((Infobox sports competition event)) – about 11,500 articles, 3,100 without a short description
• ((Infobox religious building)) – about 12,000 articles, 3,800 without a short description
• ((Infobox book)) – about 51,000 articles, 14,800 without a short description
• ((Infobox military installation)) – about 9,600 articles, 4,800 without a short description
• ((Infobox mountain)) - about 28,000 articles, 9,000 without a short description
• ((Infobox artist discography)) - about 5,700 articles, 700 without a short description
• ((Infobox station)) - about 55,000 articles, 9,800 without a short description

Bot-generated

• User:DannyS712 bot Task 4 – Short descriptions for articles about bilateral relations (approx. 3,000 articles)
• User:DannyS712 bot Task 20 – Short descriptions for outlines (approx. 400 articles)
• User:ShortDescBot – about 300,000 articles

Templates and modules

Templates and modules that are useful for this/created for helping with short descriptions:

• Module:Plain text, for removing extraneous markup
• Module:Type in location, for formatting input from |location= and getting shorter location
• Module:Is infobox in lead, for checking if the infobox is the lead infobox and the only lead infobox
• Template:Auto short description, for tagging templates that have code that automatically generates a short description.
• See also Category:Modules that create a short description

Yes, but only if it complies with the guidance at WP:SDFORMAT, including the length recommendation (the vast majority of short descriptions are shorter than 40 characters). If it is good, you can copy it to Wikipedia in one click using the helper gadget, or choose to edit the text beforehand. There is no legal issue with copying, as all Wikidata texts are in the public domain.

No. The idea of bulk-importation from Wikidata has been rejected in an RFC. Wikidata texts are often not suitable as they are not subject to Wikipedia's policies, and have a different purpose.

• Start with topics where you are sufficiently familiar to be able to write a good short description. If you run out, do anything that you are confident you can handle. If in doubt, leave it out.
• If dealing with biographies, follow the WP:BLP policy scrupulously. Don't add a date of birth unless it is properly sourced in the article
• Consider working though your watchlist (or part of it), or a WikiProject's articles, or a category
  • add the User:SD0001/shortdescs-in-category user script to help working on categories
• If you like Outlines, work through one, they may be a good source of short descriptions if well annotated, and if not, you can annotate with the short descriptions as you create them.
• All articles need a short description. Featured, Good, A and B class could be prioritised.
• If you are a bot operator, there are bot tasks to be done.
• If you don't have the time or inclination to work on this systematically:
  • consider just checking and adding a short description on articles that you will be editing anyway.
  • search for -incategory:"Articles with short description" -incategory:"All disambiguation pages" — this ignores any disambiguation pages, as they are being handled separately. You could add something like articletopic:physics or neartitle:"San Francisco" to limit to topics or places of interest.
• User:Uhai/Pages without short descriptions by view count, updated monthly

The search parameter -hastemplate:"Short description" identifies articles that do not have the template ((short description)).

You can simply use the input box below:

• Fix it: this is Wikipedia.
• Follow Bold - Revert - Discuss, or you can start with Discuss in uncertain cases. The short description is just another piece of content.
• In the case of a content dispute, get talk page consensus.
• For a BLP violation, remove or preferably replace the description, providing an edit summary to explain.
• ((subst:Uw-longsd)) can be used to warn editors who continually add very long short descriptions (documentation here). You can also write a personalized message addressing the problem, which may be more effective or appropriate in some cases.

Add your signature to the bottom of the list of project members.

Add ((User Short descriptions)) to your user page to be included in Category:WikiProject Short descriptions participants. The userbox looks like this:

This user is a participant in WikiProject Short descriptions.

You can also display a top icon as well, by adding ((Short descriptions topicon)) anywhere in your user page.

Counts of different types of pages having short descriptions

• Category:Articles with short description (5,398,086)
• Category:Redirects with short description (10,715)
• Category:Pages with short description (8) — this should be empty; pages should either be in one of the above categories, or not be categorised in this way after Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2022 December 15

Categories for this project

• Category:WikiProject Short descriptions (51)
• Category:WikiProject Short descriptions participants (204)

Counts of Short description vs. Wikidata

• Category:Short description matches Wikidata (2,040,481)
• Category:Short description is different from Wikidata (3,783,504)
• Category:Short description with empty Wikidata description (102,542)

Counts of modules/templates that create short descriptions

• Category:Modules that create a short description (3)
• Category:Templates that generate short descriptions (178)

Maintenance category to identify problems with the template parameters

• Category:Pages using short description with unknown parameters (0)

Maintenance categories to list pages with descriptions over 100 characters

• Category:Articles with long short description (11)
• Category:Drafts with long short description (43)
• Category:Files with long short description (0)
• Category:Help pages with long short description (0)
• Category:Modules with long short description (0)
• Category:Portals with long short description (0)
• Category:Project pages with long short description (0)
• Category:Redirects with long short description (0)
• Category:Templates with long short description (0)
• Category:User pages with long short description (107)

Issues with Short descriptions

• Category:Pages with lower-case short description (0)

• Wikipedia:Database reports/Short descriptions containing invalid space characters
• Wikipedia:Database reports/Short descriptions containing possibly invalid characters

• Review Category:Wikipedia pages with long short description (11)
• This TemplateParam report lists articles where the SD template has a missing or blank description.
• The main TemplateParam report can also highlight cases where the template has too many parameters.
• Also Template:Short description#Maintenance categories

Previous and current discussions on English WP short description and WikiData descriptions

Note: Template talk:Short description redirects to Wikipedia talk:Short description

Discussions related to short descriptions

When	Where	What
2017-03-27	Administrators' noticeboard	Hard to detect mobile vandalism
2017-03-28	Village pump (technical)	Discussion at ANI about Wikidata use in mobile view
2017-03-30	Village pump (proposals)	RFC Remove description taken from Wikidata from mobile view of en-WP — 2017-03-30 Withdrawn
2017-03-30	Village pump (proposals)	Blockers to having short description on mobile
2017-11-09	Template talk	Some history and explanation of this template for those without the time or inclination to read the full discussion
2017-12-08	Village pump (proposals)	RFC Populating article descriptions magic word
2018-02-07	Wikipedia talk	2018 State of affairs - Short descriptions
2018-02-17	Manual of Style talk	(position of) Short descriptions (in articles)
2018-04-14	Template talk	Infobox settlement - short descriptions
2019-04-13	Manual of Style talk	Where to put ((short_description))
2020-05-15	Village pump (WMF)	Update: Scheduled shutdown of Wikidata descriptions on EnWiki
2020-08-03	WikiData	Pi bot 14 — Import short descriptions from the English Wikipedia (bot task to copy English WP short descriptions to WikiData) Y 2020-10-20
2020-08-03	Wikipedia talk	Copying short descriptions to Wikidata — Reference to Pi bot 14 / Pi bot 5
2020-08-03	Wikipedia Bot Requests	Pi bot 5 — Synchronise short descriptions with Wikidata (bot task to copy all WikiData descriptions to English WP) — 2020-09-15 Denied
2020-08-06	Village pump (proposals)	RFC Synchronising short descriptions and Wikidata descriptions — 2020-09-05 Closed No
2020-08-07	WikiProject talk	+ RfC on bot-importing short descriptions to and from Wikidata — Reference to the above
2020-08-07	WikiProject talk	Bot proposal to create short descriptions from scratch
2020-08-07	Wikipedia talk	+ Report-assisted importing of short descriptions — Reference to the above
2021-07-20	Redirects for discussion	Proposal to delete the 7 Aliases for Short description template — 2021-07-29 closed as Clear consensus to delete the first 5 — 4 deleted