Shortcut

Adding to list articles[edit]

I plan to add an empty short description to every article starting in "List of", to significantly decrease the number of pages without short descriptions. It is embarrassing to pad my numbers with repetitive, mostly pointless changes. But hey, number goes down. -1ctinus📝🗨 00:24, 9 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I'm assuming that you mean a short description of "none", per the instructions, not an empty short description. – Jonesey95 (talk) 00:32, 9 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
yes -1ctinus📝🗨 13:44, 9 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Here is the query if anybody wants to automate this:
-hastemplate:"Short description" prefix:"List of" -1ctinus📝🗨 13:45, 9 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
DONE -1ctinus📝🗨 21:46, 9 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

A bit off topic (but sparked by this thread), I noticed that Wikipedia:Short description#Pages that should have a short description says Disambiguation pages and list articles both make use of transcluded descriptions, and those do not normally need to be edited manually (emphasis added by myself). However, standalone lists quite obviously don't have an automatically generated short desc like DAB pages, so I presume the mention of "list articles" in the sentence is a mistake? Liu1126 (talk) 00:38, 9 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Why hidden by default?[edit]

Does anyone know why short descriptions are hidden by default in Desktop? I feel like they would be as helpful to desktop users as they are to mobile users. Bensci54 (talk) 17:23, 10 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think they are. The short description shows up under each entry when you type something in the search bar, just like on mobile. Liu1126 (talk) 23:49, 10 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In the search bar yes, but only in Vector (2022) skin according to this page. They are not visible by default underneath article titles like they are on mobile unless enabled in the gadgets. Why? This ended up being a point made in an RM discussion, that since our short descriptions aren't always visible like Britannica's subtitles are, we ought to include some of the information that would be in a Britannica subtitle in our article title since it wouldn't be visible to all users if it were only stored in the short description. Bensci54 (talk) 04:12, 11 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Short descriptions are to disambiguate topics when searching for a title. That is, they should clarify which, for example, Brown is wanted if searching for that name. A short description is not article content. Johnuniq (talk) 05:10, 11 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
They are article content, and subject to the usual rules, despite being hidden on the desktop: WP:SDCONTENT MichaelMaggs (talk) 11:10, 11 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Go to your Preferences and select the Gadgets tab. Scroll down to Editing and check the Shortdesc helper. You will then be able to add and edit short descriptions from visual mode (as long as you are logged into Wikipedia). Note that you can see this helper while you are in visual mode, but it is invisible once you select edit mode. Rublamb (talk) 00:06, 11 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Nobody's really addressing your question as to why SDs do not appear beneath article titles on the desktop. It's merely history I think. SDs were originally pushed by the WMF who wanted to improve the mobile experience, especially in search results (which at that time simply showed a list of titles). They were also felt to be useful when viewing an article on mobile, as they helped viewers check they were looking at the right page without the need to scroll down on a small screen through what could be a long lead. The WMF wasn't particularly interested in the desktop experience, although they later incorporated SDs into searching with the Vector (2022) skin. Since then, SDs have become increasingly used in other situations, including third party software.
Many of us would love an option to be able to see and directly edit the SD on desktop, without having to install a gadget, but early discussions (sorry, can't find those now) foundered. If I remember rightly, the issues were whether it's really needed given that the gadget is almost functionally equavalent, layout disputes, and the need to convince the WMF to allocate resources to build it into Vector. It's unlikely they would do that just for the English Wikipedia, and other languages would need to be taken into account. So, it would not be not easy to achieve, but could perhaps benefit from another discussion now that SDs are more well known and used. MichaelMaggs (talk) 11:34, 11 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Acceptable characters[edit]

It would be useful to have a clear, definitive statement of what characters are allowed in SDs. Here is my understanding of our policy so far:

Allowed
Upper and lower case Latin characters, ASCII space, and limited punctuation (. , ; ' " - &).
Common Latin characters with diacritics (à ê ç ű ğ ...).
Unicode superscript and subscript characters for chemical and mathematical formulae.
Disallowed
Control characters (LF, Tab, soft hyphen, ...).
Special spaces (nbsp, thin space, zero-width space, ...).
Curly quotes and apostrophes -- not allowed (unfortunately!) in the text of WP pages.
Presentation forms (ffi).
Characters outside the BMP.
Questions
All Latin characters with diacritics (ȑ ấ ...), even those which aren't available in many fonts?
Simple fractions (½)?
Why do we allow endash and not emdash? I'd think that both should be replaced by ASCII hyphen.
Non-Latin characters (Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, ...)? For example, could the SD for gamma be [Third letter of the Greek alphabet: Γ/γ]?
Combining characters?

Discussion? --Macrakis (talk) 19:38, 16 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Please see Wikipedia:Database reports/Short descriptions containing possibly invalid characters for a list of other characters that are currently considered acceptable (by consensus here, not by any formal guidance). That list of SDs has been reduced from 1,899 to the current 799, mostly by fixing invalid characters; further fixes are still needed, especially em dashes that should be en dashes (or should be removed, in the case of many radio station articles).
We allow en dashes because they are used in ranges, per MOS. When would an em dash be usable?
I don't think it is necessary to include the symbol or non-English letter in the short description. An SD like "Greek letter" or "Mathematical symbol" is sufficient for disambiguation, IMO.
At that report page, you will see examples of short descriptions that are flagged by the report. If you see valid characters on that report, and I am sure there are a few, post them here. – Jonesey95 (talk) 21:30, 16 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for that interesting report.
But I think it would be useful to actually have an explicit definition that we can discuss rather than relying on our personal judgement about "valid" characters.
For example, I see no reason to exclude numeric superscripts and subscripts for chemical formulas, while allowing primes (‴) and backprimes (‷). I see no reason to allow thinspace and nbsp. I see no reason to allow okina (used for Hawaiian) while excluding similar marks used for other languages, e.g., ⟨ʿ⟩ and ⟨ʾ⟩ for Arabic and Hebrew. The definition isn't clear about which alphabetic characters it allows. It sounds as though it allows letters with diacritics, but it doesn't say whether that's limited to Latin letters or allows extended Latin (ð, æ), Greek, Cyrillic, etc. I don't understand why it allows "invisible thinspace" (is that U+2009?) or nbsp. I don't understand why it allows the multiplication sign but not division or addition.
Perhaps we should start with a rationale. For example, should this be restricted to only characters which are found in some particular font?
Should we allow certain characters only as examples of themselves, e.g., the SD of Copyright symbol might be [Symbol © used in copyright notices]. I think that would be very helpful to users.
Why not use IPA for sounds? Open-mid central rounded vowel currently has the SD [Vowel sound represented by ⟨ɞ⟩ in IPA], which seems perfect to me.
Thanks again for your work on this. --Macrakis (talk) 23:49, 17 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Many of the answers to your questions are in WP:MOS. Specifically, the multiplication symbol and invisible thinsp and nbsp are mentioned there. Discussion here may result in the definitions that you seek; the purpose of the reports is to highlight characters that are invalid by consensus and others that merit discussion. – Jonesey95 (talk) 06:38, 18 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Could you point me to the exact section of WP:MOS you have in mind?
The main page Wikipedia:Manual of Style says nothing about acceptable characters in SDs. It does mention the use of &ndsp; to control line breaks, but SDs rarely have line breaks. It does mention various other special characters, including  , −, and ⋅, but does not say that they are the only special characters that are allowed. It does not prohibit non-Latin characters; in fact it even mentions using character entities in some cases (Α) to ensure that they are easy to edit.
The page Wikipedia:Short description to which it refers only says:
The term "plain text" here might be ambiguous, except that it then continues by mentioning what it means. It does not exclude Unicode superscripts or subscripts (as opposed to HTML superscripts and subscripts) nor does it explicitly allow prime characters. And of course many articles include non-Latin characters and symbols. --Macrakis (talk) 19:41, 18 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, it is all ambiguous, in part because short descriptions were forced upon Wikipedia by Wikidata and the Wikimedia developers. This talk page is a good place to figure things out. this MOS section explicitly forbids invisible space characters, hence the name of the report Wikipedia:Database reports/Short descriptions containing invalid space characters. The other report has the word "possibly" in the title precisely because there is no clear guidance on what characters are invalid. – Jonesey95 (talk) 21:53, 18 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Exactly -- there is no clear guidance. Which is why we need to be systematic about developing guidance.
We should probably start with understanding the rationale behind limiting acceptable characters. Is it because SDs are displayed on devices which can't render some characters? Is it because Wikidata/Wikimedia software impose limitations?
Above, you said about super/subscripts, "Nearly all of them just need the specific chemical or mathematical formula removed." But that is presuming that there is something wrong with the super/subscript characters. At the same time, your script allows primes (‴), backprimes (‷), and okina, for no obvious reason. --Macrakis (talk) 22:54, 18 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It occurs to me that you keep asking questions that are answered in the section above that led to the creation of the two reports. The inclusion of the okina is explained there, for example, as it looks like a curly apostrophe, which is not allowed. – Jonesey95 (talk) 03:11, 19 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The discussion above presumes that certain characters are OK and others are not. I don't see any rationale there for why some characters are OK and others aren't. Or even a clear criterion other than "I know it when I see it". --Macrakis (talk) 15:11, 19 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I agree. – Jonesey95 (talk) 18:31, 19 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
So what process do you suggest so that we can develop a consensus rationale and then a consensus classification of characters as acceptable or not in SDs? --Macrakis (talk) 22:35, 19 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The process used here at Wikipedia is discussion leading to consensus. Ideally, there would be more than two of us participating. In the meantime, I have cleared Wikipedia:Database reports/Short descriptions containing possibly invalid characters of nearly all of the obviously invalid characters so that it is easier to see what is left. – Jonesey95 (talk) 00:20, 20 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, I've been on WP for 19 years and have 50k+ edits, so I'm familiar with that idea. That's why I opened this discussion. But it sounds like you didn't like the way I approached it, which is why I asked what process you suggested. --01:38, 20 February 2024 (UTC)
I think you're approaching it just fine. My challenge in responding was that you did not appear to have looked at the text on the two report pages or at the above discussion, or at MOS, so I felt as if I was answering questions that had already been answered. – Jonesey95 (talk) 01:52, 20 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Regarding the ʻOkina (note that ʻ is not an apostrophe) and other similar characters. If the MoS accepts their usage in articles, their usage in the short description is also fine. MOS:APOSTROPHE and MOS:OKINA allow their usage. Gonnym (talk) 10:37, 23 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Proposal to add automatic SDs to Template:Infobox election[edit]

Going through the list of articles without short descriptions, I have noticed many of them are articles for elections, eg 2015 Virginia elections or 1999 Hyndburn Borough Council election. I think that this makes it a prime candidate for adding automatically-generated short descriptions to the appropriate infobox template, Template:Infobox election. A quick search indicates that 8,374 articles use the election infobox and currently have no short description (out of the 29,177 articles using the infobox). Additionally, the articles that have both the infobox and a short description have relatively inconsistent ones, like:

Of course, not every election article uses this infobox, but this is a problem faced by every infobox template.

I'm sharing this observation and informal proposal to generate discussion. Given the diversity in existing styles and the large number of articles without SDs, this isn't a straightforward problem. What do you think? Should we seek to have the Template:Infobox election automatically generate short descriptions? If so, what should be the standard format? Are there different sub-cases that should be handled differently? Would this be a problem better handled by a dedicated bot? - - mathmitch7 (talk/contribs) 17:27, 23 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I feel like this should be discussed at Template talk:Infobox election, but otherwise I see no reason why it can't add a shortdesc like dozens of other infoboxes. It would be set to not replace an existing one, so any of the current "inconsistent" uses would stay. Primefac (talk) 18:22, 23 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

"X in X" articles[edit]

What should be the proper short description for articles with an "x in x" title such as Basketball in Tuvalu, Women in Tuvalu, or Health in Tuvalu, etc? should it be blank, since those titles are self explantitory? What should be the procedure, with examples of the articles listed above? Thanks. -1ctinus📝🗨 01:21, 29 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

If the meaning is self evident, as in your examples, you should use "None" - see WP:SDNONE. MichaelMaggs (talk) 22:14, 29 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Variation between different language Wikipedias[edit]

A short section detailing differences in practice for different languages would be useful. For example, I currently want to know whether "Don't start with an article" applies in Swedish Wikipedia. (The Android app has decided to suggest I read Swedish articles about islands, whose short descriptions often begin with en ö i . . . instead of just ö i . . . These are jumping out at me as potentially wrong and I'd like to know whether to change them.) Musiconeologist (talk) 12:10, 5 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I've added a cautionary footnote to the formatting section, about other languages not necessarily using uppercase. Musiconeologist (talk) 13:15, 5 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
As far as I know, the English Wikipedia is the only Wikipedia site making its own short descriptions. All other descriptions are managed on Wikidata, where a omitting the article is the standard in English and also in Swedish. – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:35, 5 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Jonesey95 Ah, thanks. I didn't realise. I've just checked one of the articles in question, and there's certainly no sign of anything resembling a short description template in the wikitext. Musiconeologist (talk) 16:49, 5 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
They are typically pulled from Wikidata when you do a search (or cached locally from Wikidata; I don't know the exact details). If you are on sv.WP and you do a search for Sverige, you should see "konstitutionell monarki i Nordeuropa" under the article title in the search results. They also appear under the title in mobile view, and on the Page information page. – Jonesey95 (talk) 17:07, 5 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Formatting section[edit]

I think the bullet point about being short belongs under Content text rather than Formatting. I've not moved it, because it affects the bookmarks and I'm not overly familiar with editing them. Musiconeologist (talk) 13:48, 5 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Bug report: Template code to auto-generate short descriptions fails to work[edit]

I tested several, and none of the templates that use code to automatically generate a short description when displaying search results on the mobile site actually worked to display a short description. I am not a techie who can fix this, nor even know who to report it to, but this talk page seems sufficiently on-topic to be able to alert someone who does know.

Take any template from Category:Templates that generate short descriptions and do an insource search for it (minus the word "description", so as to exclude articles which explicitly use the "short description" template), then check in the mobile site to see if any of those articles display a short description. They don't.

As an example, take Template:Infobox song. Do the search: insource:"Infobox song" -description

There are 2,300 results! Take any one of the article titles and do a search for it in the mobile site and you will see no short description displayed. I have tested several other templates that use code to auto-generate short descriptions (including settlement, royalty, port, and a few others). They all fail; I have seen no exceptions.

I would really like to see this bug fixed, and the use of autogenerating short descriptions used more broadly in infobox templates, because it's a great idea.   ▶ I am Grorp ◀ 19:03, 5 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I looked at half a dozen articles in those Infobox song search results, and none of them have an automatically generated short description. My first guess is that it has something to do with Module:Is infobox in lead, which ((Infobox song)) uses to determine whether to apply a short description. You might need to start a discussion at Template talk:Infobox song to ask if that module is working correctly in pages with multiple instances of ((Infobox song)).
The "settlement" search results returning just four results should have been a hint. Narkeldanga, for example, had a typo that was making the infobox fail to render. The other three are false positives.
As for your all-encompassing bug description, I do not think it is correct. Bak, Hungary has a short description generated by an infobox, and when I search for it on the mobile site, I see a short description in the first search result. – Jonesey95 (talk) 19:41, 5 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
((Infobox royalty)) will not create a short description if |title= and |succession= are both empty. Your infobox port search results were returning false positives; here's a better search. – Jonesey95 (talk) 19:59, 5 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Jonesey95: The short description displayed for Bak, Hungary is "Village in Western Transdanubia, Hungary", however the word "Transdanubia" does not exist in its infobox, so where is it coming from? It does have a Wikidata entry, but I don't see the word "Transdanubia" there, either. I have checked a sufficient number of infobox templates which use different code (quite unlike the code used in infobox songs) to know that the problem is more widespread than just one infobox template. Finding some that do work (but don't make sense), or making dismissive assumptions such as search results returning just four results should have been a hint neither explains the failed short description displays nor is it helpful.   ▶ I am Grorp ◀ 20:03, 5 March 2024 (UTC) (Edited to add: I see that "Western Transdanubia" is coming from some sort of look up related to List of regions of Hungary. That is not intuitive at all.   ▶ I am Grorp ◀ 20:42, 5 March 2024 (UTC))[reply]
With regards to your assertion about ((Infobox royalty)), Farrukh Hormizd's title is blank but succession is not... generates no display. I added a test title, and it displayed my test. The code in the infobox
((#if:((Has short description)) |<!--Do nothing--> |((Infobox royalty/short description|(({title|(({succession|))))))))))
isn't obvious why succession would not display if title was blank, nor is there mention in the template documentation as to what will display, and when. None of the templates asserting to create auto-generating short descriptions (that I checked) explain what they display and any conditions that must be met. There is no explicit "if" wording in the template's coding—and if there is some sort of assumed "if" by reason of "code syntax", I don't know what that is; hence it manifests as a bug across multiple infobox templates (each coded differently). If I understood the coding, then I could fix both the coding and the documentation, and avoid a bug report. But since multiple templates appear to be buggy, I wrote the report as general so someone would look at it. That multiple individual infobox templates might be buggy because of poor coding or documentation, doesn't mean the report is incorrect or not useful and ought be ignored.   ▶ I am Grorp ◀ 20:26, 5 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The Hungary location has that text in |subdivision_name1=, generated by a template. You can see it in the rendered infobox. I have adjusted ((Infobox royalty)) to ignore empty parameters; template parameter usage has a fundamental design flaw in that empty parameters are treated differently from missing parameters. That change has fixed Farrukh Hormizd.
Template documentation is written by all of us. I clarified the template documentation for ((Infobox royalty)) after examining the code and seeing that there were conditions. The original coder should have written it, but we are all volunteers, and some people are good at code and bad at description.
As you can see, I am not ignoring your report. On the contrary, I have responded to each of your specific reports. As far as I can tell from the above reports, you found individual problems with a few different templates, and a few things that looked like problems because of false positives in search results. If you find problems with specific templates, issues should be reported on those templates' talk pages. Feel free to ping me from those discussions in case I am not watching the page. I enjoy troubleshooting templates. If you find a general pattern, feel free to report it here. Happy editing! – Jonesey95 (talk) 21:01, 5 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you very much, Jonesey95. I see the changes to both the code and the documentation (((Auto short description))). Very concise. Thank you for looking at this. I would like to make some changes to a template to include the auto-short-desc feature, as well as write a new infobox template for a project I am working on. This information will come much in handy. Thank you for offering to help via pinging. In the meantime, I consider this report thread answered (at least as far as my concerns were).   ▶ I am Grorp ◀ 21:19, 5 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

WP:SDNONE and "History of"[edit]

There are almost 2000 articles that start with "History of" that don't have a short description. I believe that it applies for WP:SDNONE (which is horribly vague in my opinion). If I get the greenlight from another editor without disapproval, I will script it to add descriptions to it semi-automatically. -1ctinus📝🗨 19:39, 24 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

That should be OK as long as you will be approving each and every one manually, as there are quite a few "history of X" articles where "X" won't be self-evident to many readers and needs explanation, eg History of the Tasmanian AFL bid and History of the Cleveland Guardians. If you are thinking of setting up a script that will run through the list without personal intervention for every article, you'd need to obtain bot approval. ~~~~ MichaelMaggs (talk) 20:37, 24 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, per WP:MEATBOT. — Qwerfjkltalk 21:46, 24 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Here's the problem with some of these, is that none of my hypothetical attempts seem to make good short descriptions; take History of the Detroit Tigers as an example:
  • "Aspect of history" (per wikidata) - vague and adds nothing
  • "Baseball franchise history" - clunky and worded in a similar way to the title
  • "History of a baseball franchise" - not too crazy on the "a" article, still makes it clunky
I would like to find a good formula for coming up with descriptions for these "History of" articles that fail WP:SDNONE, as I don't have any good ideas. -1ctinus📝🗨 23:28, 24 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I whole-heartedly agree all "Aspects of history" should be gone asap. Like I said below, I was going around and changing those (and similar SDs) to "none" but ran into articles that didnt seem to make sense to be "nones". It was actually while working on SDs in Australia that got me thinking about it, specifically History of the Northern Territory. Unless you know that's a territory of Australia, "none" doesn't make sense. Wouldnt "History of the Austrailian territory" (or something to that effect) be better? Masterhatch (talk) 23:48, 24 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I agree, but I am trying to come up with an ideal formula for articles such as the one you mentioned, as described above. -1ctinus📝🗨 23:50, 24 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The best you can do, I think, is to use AWB or similar to step through all the relevant "History of . . ." articles, accepting "None" where it works and skipping those where it doesn't. The skipped ones then need to be handled individually. Articles where "None" isn't appropriate vary, and there isn't a general formula. In the example you gave, I'd use "History of a baseball franchise" MichaelMaggs (talk) 08:53, 25 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
A few months ago, I changed a whole bunch of "History of..."s to "none"s. Then I stopped. It seemed to make sense for many of those to be "none" but then I ran into others that i wasnt too sure about. It makes sense for History of Canada (a commomn term we don't often wiki link to) but it seemed to make less sense for provinces, such as History of Saskatchewan. To me, for a province (or state or city or region) wouldnt an SD of "History of a Canadian province" for Saskatchewan make more sense than "none"? I was going to bring it up here but I never got around to it. Masterhatch (talk) 21:49, 24 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

adding a generator to Template:infobox musical[edit]

I have made a short description generator for infobox musical and I just want some extra eyes on it before I add it to the template. 

((#if:((Has short description)) |<!--Do nothing--> |((short description|((#if:((#invoke:string|match|(({premiere_date|))}|%d%d%d%d|ignore_errors = true))|((#invoke:string|match|(({premiere_date|))}|%d%d%d%d|ignore_errors = true)) m| M))usical((#if:(({music|))}(({lyrics|))}|((#ifeq:((Plain text|(({music|))))}|((Plain text|(({lyrics|))))}|((spaces))by ((Plain text|(({music|))))))))))))}

Thanks! -1ctinus📝🗨 01:23, 7 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

If you put it in the sandbox, you can test it at Special:ExpandTemplates. – Jonesey95 (talk) 07:58, 7 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
A version with fixed bugs has been added to the template, It seems to be working well. -1ctinus📝🗨 17:38, 7 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Good articles appear to be done[edit]

Searching -hastemplate:"Short description" hastemplate:"Good article" isn't returning anything for me, do we cross it off the project tasks checklist? Orchastrattor (talk) 02:24, 14 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Without short description[edit]

Hi short description experts, if you're interested some Italian foods are without short description (e.g., gelo di melone). JacktheBrown (talk) 20:35, 19 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Using the SD category script when looking at Category:Italian cuisine and its subcategories should make it easy to pick out the 5 to 10% of articles without SDs. – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:20, 20 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Jonesey95, in some cases User:1234qwer1234qwer4/shortdescs-in-category.js is more helpful for adding short descriptions. — Qwerfjkltalk 17:31, 22 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I've done a few. It was easy to fix Gelo di melone in just one click. MichaelMaggs (talk) 08:47, 22 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Articles that are simultaneously both "Short description matches Wikidata" and "Short description is different from Wikidata"[edit]

It appears that articles can be simultaneously placed in both the Short description matches Wikidata category and the seemingly inconsistent category Short description is different from Wikidata. For example, see UEFA Europa Conference League and 2024–25_CONCACAF_Nations_League. Can this phenomenon be investigated to help determine if there is an appropriate way to fix it? Thank you. Coining (talk) 02:16, 28 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I think this is because the infoboxes of these two pages (Template:Infobox football tournament and Template:Infobox international football competition) also automatically generate short descriptions. These were later overridden by a manual short description that matches the Wikidata description, but for some reason the automatic shortdesc, which differs from the Wikidata description, is still being detected. For example, I removed the manually overriding short description on 2024–25 CONCACAF Nations League, and now the page is only categorised under Category:Short description is different from Wikidata. Not sure how to fix this though. Liu1126 (talk) 10:05, 28 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Much thanks for at least, seemingly, finding a manual solution. I'll await any further advice, but I may proceed by bringing up your observation on those template talk pages. Coining (talk) 13:35, 28 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Also see this less-watched discussion page, where other options were discussed. – Jonesey95 (talk) 13:47, 28 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Unfortunately, it seems that the fix used by Template:Infobox film still fails; Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel, for example, uses infobox film but is still double categorised, which is very strange since the conditional should, in theory, prevent the dual invocation of Module:SDcat that is causing the problem.
In the final comment in Wikipedia talk:Short description/Archive 8#Adding tracking categories, RexxS said that there's no easy general solution because Lua can't simply get the local short description from page_props, so I guess we'll just have to bear with it until someone does a whole revamp of the code. Liu1126 (talk) 14:32, 28 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Infobox film in that "Alvin" article is working fine; it's ((Infobox video game)) that is causing the dual categories in that one. – Jonesey95 (talk) 19:29, 28 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Oh, you're right. I just searched incategory:"Short description matches Wikidata" AND incategory:"Short description is different from Wikidata" AND hastemplate:"Infobox film" and found a few results, but upon closer inspection it seems that none of these are caused by Infobox film itself. Guess the fix works then, though I don't know if it would be worth the effort making this standard for all automatic sdescs. Liu1126 (talk) 19:38, 28 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Liu1126, can you help me to understand why you believe that it is the templates that are automatically adding the short descriptions? In the UEFA Europa Conference League article, the errant short description was added well after the template (see Version comparison showing edit in September 2020. Coining (talk) 13:51, 28 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Some templates have an automatic short description embedded within their code (at the end of the template code, enclosed within <includeonly> tags), like the two I mentioned above. This short description doesn't appear inside the wikitext of the target page (because the template is transcluded), and it gets overridden when an explicit instance of Template:Short description is added to the target page (due to its noreplace parameter). See Wikipedia:WikiProject Short descriptions#Auto-generated and bot-generated descriptions for more info. These manual short descriptions aren't necessarily "errant"; in cases where the automatic short description isn't ideal, it is recommended to manually override them. Liu1126 (talk) 14:02, 28 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Categories