Wikipedia talk:Short description

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 Previous context: § Not a definition, but the Android app doesn't agree

The Android mobile user app may be partly to blame for many of the incorrect Short descriptions. Apparently, the Android app gives users the following instruction or label to users about how to enter a short description in English Wikipedia:

"Summarize an article to help readers understand the subject at a glance."

This was first spotted by Musiconeologist, and is now being tracked in Phab T390105.

If you were going to give advice to the developers of the Android mobile user app, how would you like to see the app express a brief instruction most likely to lead a user of the app to properly formulate a short desc for an article? Mathglot (talk) 20:39, 26 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Mathglot These aren't deeply pondered suggestions, but here are a few clumsy attempts:

• Clarify an article's title by adding a short phrase shown in search results
• Add a short phrase to make an article's title easier to understand in search results
• Make search results easier to understand use by annotating article titles

—Users will most likely already have searched with the app, so mentioning searches will tell them what they're adding, and they can try a search afterwards to check the result. Musiconeologist (talk) 21:28, 26 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

These all seem reasonable to me, they fit nicely to the wording at WP:SDPURPOSE. YuniToumei (talk) 10:27, 27 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@YuniToumei Just noting that I've since reworded the third one slightly. Musiconeologist • talk • contribs 15:13, 11 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I like #2; it's hard to explain what it does in a short phrase, but I think that does a pretty good job of it. Mathglot (talk) 17:56, 11 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I think the strength of #2 is that it starts with the concrete call to action and follows with the explanation. #1 and #3 lead with the aim, which might be more direct at conveying the intention behind SDs, but might start with what is more abstract to a new user. Though as said they're all good and this is very detailed tailoring of specifics.YuniToumei (talk) 20:11, 11 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It's about uniqueness, or really, *distinguishing* one search result from another, where the title alone doesn't do that. The tricky part, is how to explain that the SD is about adding just enough to distinguish them, and not a whole definition. Building on #2, what about something like:

• 2a: Add a short phrase to make it easier to choose the right article from among search results with similar titles
• 2b: Add a short phrase to make it easier for the reader to pick the right article from among search results with similar titles
• 2c: Write a short phrase to display with the article title in search results to help distinguish articles with similar titles

Writing a short explanation seems to be a lot harder than writing a short description, but I think we are getting there . Mathglot (talk) 20:47, 11 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think it's entirely about uniqueness. For search results that's the main purpose, but another place they're used is in the app feed, which every so often displays Because you read: [some article] followed by a list of five suggestions consisting of title, short description, and an image. There, the relevant question is "Does that look like something I might want to read?" They're used in saved "reading lists" too, where they're a reminder of what the saved article is. But in all the different uses, the combined title and SD need to communicate something useful.

Also, a search isn't necessarily for a specific article, but "I wonder what there is about x? And I quite often stumble on something of interest when it tangentially appears in a popup list of results as I'm typing the search term for something else.

I focused on search results in those explanations because it's the most obvious place where they're used and applies to desktop and the app, but I think we need to have the general situation of a list of titles in mind. For some of the uses, it's mainly about making the title meaningful. Musiconeologist • talk • contribs 21:44, 11 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This edit request to Template:Short description/doc has been answered. Set the |answered= parameter to no to reactivate your request.

Request permission to add a listing to the Mississippi Museum Page for the Old Courthouse Museum, Iuka Mississippi OldCourthouse (talk) 20:38, 10 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@OldCourthouse You're on completely the wrong page. Are you in fact trying to request an edit to the article List of museums in Mississippi? If so, you should do it at Talk:List of museums in Mississippi. Musiconeologist • talk • contribs 22:08, 10 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

 Not done: Wrong place. PianoDan (talk) 22:32, 10 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This edit request to Template:Short description/doc has been answered. Set the |answered= parameter to no to reactivate your request.

Request Permission to add and entry to this page for the Old Courthouse Museum, Iuka, Mississippi

Old Courthouse Museum, Tishomingo County, Northeast Mississippi Local History and Regional History. Battle of Iuka. Marriage Capital of the South.

Website: https://www.courthousemuseum.com/#/ Located in the old Tishomingo County Court House. Erected 1870. Hours 9-4, Wednesday thru Friday. 203 E. Quitman Street, Iuka MS 38852 662-423-3500 OldCourthouse (talk) 15:33, 11 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

 Not done: Please stop posting this request here - this is the talk page for a technical bit of code that affects the entire encyclopedia, and has nothing to do with a courthouse in Iuka. You were given a link in the previous section to where you likeley wanted to post. Even if that isn't right, THIS page definitely isn't. PianoDan (talk) 16:01, 11 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Courtest pings for @Jonesey95 and @GhostInTheMachine Per recent reverts to what I felt were a couple of harmless shortcuts and super easy to remember (at least for me), I am now going through the motions of building consensus for the addition of the two shortcuts for the general short description page "WP:SHORTY" and then for the section which deals with 40 character guidelines "WP:SHORTYFORTY".

The counter argument may follow, "there are already several shortcuts already and they are sufficient, no more are needed." Which is all well and good, but the point of a shortcut is to be short, sweet, and easy to remember.. I felt the current ones were not all of that, at least for me. So if it is acceptable, I would like for those two to be added back. Thanks everyone. Iljhgtn (talk) 14:22, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

We already have four shortcuts there. I recommend finding a way to remember one or more of them. We don't usually use cute or slangy wording for shortcuts at Wikipedia. – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:32, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Actually many such type of shortcuts exist and are helpful. What is disruptive about one more (per section)? Would also like @GhostInTheMachine's take. Iljhgtn (talk) 14:38, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Personally, I think it is more disruptive to force a talk page discussion and get drawn out into a conversation involving the time and effort of multiple potential editors/contributors over just permitting two "cute" shortcuts, but maybe that is just me. Iljhgtn (talk) 14:39, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

If you have a problem with WP:BRD, please raise issues about it at its talk page. – Jonesey95 (talk) 20:21, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I wouldn't feel strongly enough to revert them, but I primarily know shorty as an insult shouted out in the street at people whose height is lower than average. So that makes me uncomfortable with them.

(As for the humour, WP:SD40 does look rather like a play on WD-40 to me, though maybe that's by coincidence.) Musiconeologist • talk • contribs 17:29, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I have no particular stance on this, but I will say that there are hundreds of shortcut redirects out there that aren't specifically called out on their target page, and there is no problem with using them around the encyclopedia to reach the target. If the shortcut is obscure and likely to WP:ASTONISH, it probably should go to RfD. If the shortcut isn't listed, but still can be figured out by the destination page and section/content (which these are), I see no problem whether listed or not. -2pou (talk) 20:52, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This seems perfectly sensible to me. I've no objection to those shortcuts landing here if somebody uses them, but listed shortcuts do seem to acquire a semi-official status in people's minds that I wouldn't want to give to those particular ones. Musiconeologist • talk • contribs 21:32, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I won't spend my time arguing against the existence of these cutesy redirects either, but they should not be listed on this page. – Jonesey95 (talk) 21:41, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I think this is an agreeable consensus then. The redirects remain, but not as listed shortcuts. Thank you everyone. Iljhgtn (talk) 22:41, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

As a side-effect of this discussion, I did a little tidying so that each shortcut now links to a specific anchor. e.g. WP:SDLENGTH used to link to #SDFORMAT, but now links to #SDLENGTH — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 13:11, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I have no objection to this. Nice work. Iljhgtn (talk) 19:20, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Not sure I quite believe this, but there is a bug in the handling of SD=none. {{short description|none|noreplace}} is being treated as {{short description|none}}. This means that an infobox that sets a SD of none is overriding a valid local SD in the article. Looking at the template edit in January 2025, there is a change to use the new behaviour of the magic word: p1=none generates an empty magic word, but the noreplace is being lost. I saw this in an article using {{Infobox national football team}} and the only fix was to add the "normal" {{Has short description}} test to the infobox. The test is classed as "expensive" so we probably should avoid adding it too often, but there seem to be about 30 infoboxen that may need to be changed — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 08:20, 9 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Nearer 20 infoboxen and some are already OK. Also, {{Has short description}} does not seem to be classed as "expensive". Some of the infoboxen are protected, so I cannot fix all of them myself — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 08:49, 9 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Trying to wrap my head around this, since it has appeared a bunch of times below already, is the transclusion-based SD-none override a bug or a feature now? As in, do we just roll with the new behaviour and fix pages where it breaks things, or is this something to be raised on phabricator? YuniToumei (talk) 07:29, 17 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The issues below are both from a different cause – explicit but evil transclusions of other articles that have their own short description template. The override misbehaviour is a bug introduced a few months age. I will fix some of the side-effects but the short description template does need a further change. It is not complicated, but needs doing with some caution. I will post a suitable change request ASAP — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 07:41, 17 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, I see! Thanks for the explanation and for your work :) Cheers! YuniToumei (talk) 07:46, 17 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The page whole genome sequencing has the short description template in it but the information page for the whole genome sequencing page says it doesn't have a local short description and shortdesc helper says the page doesn't have a short description either. – Treetoes023 (talk) 06:05, 11 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

That was evil, but it is now fixed. This dates way back to an edit on 7 October 2016 by Evolution and evolvability. The edit included Lists of sequenced genomes by transclusion. i.e. inserting the list article as a template instead of just linking to it. The list, correctly, had an SD of none. The none from the list then overrode the SD from the whole genome sequencing article. For many years, the article SD would have displayed as Wikipedia list article until it was changed to none in 2022 — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 11:17, 11 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

An editor has been making mass changes to the short descriptions for state flag (see: Flag of South Carolina). Attempts to discuss these changes yielded poor results, but another editor pointed out WP:SDEXAMPLES and I see Mississippi listed an example. Mississippi was recently added[1] as an example and I can't find a specific discussion here that led to that addition. Should all U.S. State flag short descriptions be changed to mirror Mississippi? - Thanks! Nemov (talk) 15:58, 12 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I don't see why they shouldn't. A short description isn't supposed to be unique to the article - for example, David Tennant is "Scottish actor (born 1971)". That covers quite a few people. --SarekOfVulcan (talk) 17:29, 12 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The new SD for Flag of South Carolina is better. It fits the pattern "[Article subject] is/was a/an/the ... " given at WP:SDEXAMPLES without being a comprehensive definition. We don't need to repeat the name of the state in the SD. – Jonesey95 (talk) 13:55, 14 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Template is present on the page, but it is current rendering without one. Thought it might be related to the above discussion about the whole genome sequencing article, but I don't see anything transcluded in this article. Perhaps I missed it, or perhaps it's a different issue altogether. I don't see any recent edits that I would expect to affect this. QuietHere (talk | contributions) 02:06, 17 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I played with it for a while, suspecting a duplicate short description of "none" somewhere on the page, or a hidden character in the short description, but nothing made the SD appear in the right places (i.e. in search results, or on the Page information page, or in the SD helper gadget). The Wikidata item has a good description, but the SD helper gadget does not show it for some reason. This seems like some kind of database bug that might work itself out when some cache gets emptied or refreshed, but I don't know. – Jonesey95 (talk) 05:19, 17 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Fixed. Another list was transcluded into the article. Being a list, it had SD=none which overrode the article SD — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 06:46, 17 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Strange. I copied the page's wikitext into Special:ExpandTemplates and was able to see the first description in the expanded code (with display:none as usual), but I was unable to find any other strings in code matching "desc". – Jonesey95 (talk) 13:24, 17 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Good to know it was the same issue as before and I just missed it. Thanks @GhostInTheMachine. QuietHere (talk | contributions) 00:47, 18 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Shouldn't the section on annotated links state that they should be considered temporary, awaiting an intelligently phrased link by someone who is informed about the subject? Michael Hardy (talk) 17:42, 18 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Please suggest some revised wording, along with a reason for changing the wording. Many annotated links work fine. – Jonesey95 (talk) 00:15, 19 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I think the policy is fine as it is. Many annotated links work perfectly and don’t need amending. Where they do, editors have the option of either overriding the default annotation or amending the SD itself. MichaelMaggs (talk) 02:44, 19 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Jonesey95: @MichaelMaggs: I seldom see annotated links that don't make me think that the invention of annotated links is the worst thing that ever happened to Wikipedia. Michael Hardy (talk) 20:10, 10 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The redirect Short description has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2025 May 29 § Short description until a consensus is reached. I am bad at usernames (talk | contribs) 01:19, 29 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hello! I've made a user script that when installed can send you to a random article without a short description when pressing the keys <Ctrl> + <Shift> + <R> It is located at User:Macaw*/UserScript1.js and you can follow the guide here to install it. Best wishes, Macaw*! 20:20, 31 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Whilst it's true perfect is the enemy of good, have you considered using the search API (e.g. this query) which comes with bonus features like random sorting? — Qwerfjkltalk 15:33, 1 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I would but I’m too lazy to mess with the API. Best wishes, Macaw*! Best wishes, Macaw*! 17:15, 1 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

For the articles without short description sorted by view count, the last article listed for February had around 1000 views, the list for March a bit more, the list for April a bit less. Why does the least-viewed article for the most recent todo list have more views than any of the others? Is there just more interest in niche Wikipedia articles this time of year? LR.127 (talk) 02:40, 8 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

March and May have 31 days. If you divide each of the lowest numbers by the number of days in the month, you will probably see variation that is not statistically significant. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:13, 9 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Possibly so. Even still, this seems unusual - looks like people over at the village pump have noticed as well. Cheers. LR.127 (talk) 03:57, 10 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Does this page have a short description or not? For two months (1, 2), it's been showing up on the automated list as missing a short description, yet it has the hidden categories of Category:Redirects with short description and Category:Short description with empty Wikidata description. LR.127 (talk) 19:21, 12 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Pinging Uhai since its their list. But I think the reason (looking at their source code) is that the query used to generate the list should filter out redirect pages (since these generally don't need a sdesc), but Passport stamps by country or territory seems to not be considered a redirect page in the database (presumably due to it being a soft redirect), and the query doesn't check for Category:Redirects with short description (presumably because Uhai assumed all redirects would've been filtered out in the first place). If I'm understanding the code correctly, I think the fix would be to add 'Redirects_to_Wikimedia_Commons' to the query, similar to how 'Redirects_to_Wiktionary' are checked for. Liu1126 (talk) 19:46, 12 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for letting me know; I will fix this. Uhai (talk) 23:41, 12 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Western Sahara started showing up in Category:Articles with long short description after this edit. Suppressing the infobox short description fixed the issue, but I'm still perplexed as to why this happened in the first place. As far as I can see Module:Settlement short description uses the noreplace keyword and indeed it didn't replace the short description displayed by shortdesc helper, so why did it result in the article being categorised? Liu1126 (talk) 18:27, 20 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Is the word short {short description|in this context} capitalized or not? Not to mention inconsistency among articles ... 2601:840:8000:CDC0:2CCC:5A1E:B07C:725 (talk) 12:22, 23 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It doesn't matter. The first letter of any template can be either lower case or upper case. – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:06, 23 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

With the current 100 characters threshold, this maintenance category is almost always empty, so would it be worth it to lower that threshold. At first glance, not sure how we would do that or see how populated the category would be if it was say 90 or 95 characters. -- Patar knight - ^chat/_{contributions} 23:01, 25 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It is empty because editors monitor it and empty it. If the threshold were 90 or 95 characters, the same condition would occur, and there would be more arguing about valid but longer short descriptions. In answer to your "how populated" issue, somewhere in the archives of this talk page or a related talk page, there is a discussion of a query or report that showed a distribution of the number of articles with each length of short description. Running that query or report again would probably enlighten you. If you can't find the discussion, let me know and I'll look for it. – Jonesey95 (talk) 00:26, 26 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Sigh. Sometimes I can't just walk away and let people have fun finding things. Here's the discussion, from 2022. And here is a discussion about the nuances of the query. And here's the output from the query as of today. I have not dug in to determine whether the data is accurate (e.g. I can't explain the "100+" numbers), but it should be roughly so.

If the data above are accurate, they might help to inform discussion. Somebody could crunch the numbers to figure out what percentage are under 40 characters, over 80 characters, or whatever. If the data are accurate, it looks like 0.3% (about 22,000) of 7,000,000+ article pages have SDs that are 80 characters or longer. – Jonesey95 (talk) 00:33, 26 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, please reduce to 80. Coincidentally, I was just thinking yesterday about suggesting a reduction to that, still a figure above which all examples are either attempts to closely define the topic, direct copies of fairly useless Wikidata descriptions, or complete misunderstandings. There are enough editors working on these maintenance categories that fixing 22,000 excessively long SDs should be doable in a few months, and it's an easy way for people to help out when, as now, the top 3000 list has all been done. MichaelMaggs (talk) 08:42, 26 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I think we need more information before taking that big step. I can't even assure you that the numbers above are valid, for example; the "long SD" category is empty, but the table says that there should be 31 articles in it (or maybe there are exactly 31 articles at 100 characters). I ran the report again with slightly different criteria, and it told me there were 27 articles with an SD length of 100, and 5 at 101+. That doesn't make sense, so I think the query may need adjustment. As a possible next step, I would like to a see a table of the 1,0000 longest short descriptions to see if they can reasonably be shortened. I don't know how to generate such a table, but I will work on it. – Jonesey95 (talk) 13:52, 26 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, a table would be helpful. I've done maintenance in the category and on long but <100 character SDs in the wild and I agree with MichaelMaggs that virtually all of the 80/90 characters+ SDs don't follow SD guidelines and could be improved by shortening.

With a populated category, we could create a page similar to User:Uhai/Pages without short descriptions by view count so maintenance can be done by order of impact. Having a second place to work from would like MichaleMaggs said, reduce the friction in people helping out. Personally, once Uhai's list is done, I don't work on SDs except when I encounter bad/missing ones in the wild and maybe check if it belongs to a category that could be quickly done.

Also, if we do lower the threshold, it could be via a new category, so we could have a general category for gradual maintenance as well as a subcategory for 100+ characters for high priority cases. If there's a decent number of 80/90 character+ SDs that are actually useful, maybe we could create something like Template:Useful long short description to categorize and remove them from the maintenance category. -- Patar knight - ^chat/_{contributions} 14:09, 26 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I have created a report at Wikipedia:Database reports/Long short descriptions. It currently lists all articles with SDs of more than 98 characters. The threshold can be modified by changing the number in the SQL code; it's not too scary. The report can be refreshed manually by clicking "Update the table now". – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:25, 26 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I decreased the report's threshold to "more than 97 characters", and there are 720 articles in the table. Decreasing the threshold by one character at a time should tell us when we reach the point of cutting muscle and bone from SDs rather than fat. – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:42, 26 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Editors have been trying different things with the report; here's a version with the threshold set to 90 characters, which had 5,005 articles listed. That is probably too long to process easily; I have returned the threshold to 93, which yields 2,657 articles (525,000 bytes of content, which is already pretty big). I recommend working on those before lowering the threshold further. So far, I have found that it is easy to reduce most SDs in the report to below 80 characters without losing information, but I have been skipping around looking for easy ones. – Jonesey95 (talk) 17:59, 26 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed. While many items are admittedly a bit more complicated to assign a SD (e.g. abstract, technical, multiple fields), almost everything can be reduced to 80 without issue, most can be reduced to 60, and in some cases 40 characters is possible when the original SD is particularly bad. I also agree that we should be starting at a number close to the 3000 limit in User:Uhai/Pages without short descriptions by view count for general maintenance work at the moment. -- Patar knight - ^chat/_{contributions} 18:05, 26 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I've been working with 90, and have found no problems so far. Many turn out to be technical subjects where an attempt has been made at definition, or the text has been clipped out of the first sentence of the lead. As with many technical topics, they sometimes need a couple of minutes thinking about and aren't necessarily trivial, but all so far can be much improved by shortening. MichaelMaggs (talk) 18:12, 26 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It looks like the new report is useful and flexible. I have seen significant reduction in the population of the report since its creation, so gnomes are clearly watching this page and using the report. Using the table's sorting feature, I have found multiple batches of easy fixes. I agree with Patar knight that getting SDs below 80 is usually easy. If we clear the table of everything below 90 characters, we'll see what the 80–89-character range looks like (there are about 16,000 articles in that population). Some of them might be tricky.
Editors are welcome to click the "Update the table now" link to clear recently processed articles off of the list. – Jonesey95 (talk) 19:04, 26 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This is really useful - thanks! MichaelMaggs (talk) 19:08, 26 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]