Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2025-02-27/Tips and tricks

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Urban Versis 32 and anyone interested in this WikiProject, I think there should be a mandatory requirement for new pages and AfC noms to have a short description and an incoming link from another article. Otherwise, editors will be working on the SHORTDESC and ORPHAN problems in perpetuity, because new articles would continually have to be brought in line with the standards. This would be something similar to how user-generated sources cannot be added to any page. I was thinking of writing something in The Signpost about this, but I was not sure where to start. Thank you for this article. Cheers Matarisvan (talk) 12:30, 27 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Nothing is mandatory to contribute. If there's anything that is explicitly okay for editors to skip at AFC, it's boilerplate stuff gnomes without familiarity with the topic can do, like short descriptions and categories and navigation templates. If there was a drive to toughen requirements at AFC, priorities 1 through 1000 should be around sourcing, which is far more time-consuming for random Wikipedians to review. SnowFire (talk) 21:56, 27 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Also note that in the AFCH reviewing tool used by AfC reviewers, during the accept process, editors can add a short description to the draft if it doesn't already have one. (I always add a short desc to submissions I'm accepting if it doesn't have one.) Urban Versis 32^KB ⚡ ^{(talk / contribs)} 02:20, 28 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

From my perspective, a significant issue here is that the short description does not appear in the default web-based view. I'm in Safari now, and clicking through articles shows no indication that this is present or missing. The only way to know this is to click Edit and examine the source. I am not sure I am using the default view, but it seems a more obvious visual indication would help matters. Maury Markowitz (talk) 12:44, 27 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

True, most web-based versions of Wikipedia do not utilize this feature, something I thing should be adjusted. Urban Versis 32^KB ⚡ ^{(talk / contribs)} 02:17, 28 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

One year after this article is posted, will every single article on Wikipedia have a short description?. No, because not every article requires one, per WP:SDNONE where it says, If the primary purposes of a short description are entirely met by the title wording, that is a good indication that "none" would be appropriate.. Mentioning that fact would have been a service to the community. Marcus Markup (talk) 13:16, 27 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Good point, I have added some quick notes to the article covering this. Thanks for the advice and sorry I forgot to add this sooner! Urban Versis 32^KB ⚡ ^{(talk / contribs)} 02:16, 28 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Short Description is indeed a good thing but as a frequent coach at edit-athons, I think we should not add it to the requirements for a new article. New editors have enough trouble with more vital ideas like what's a Reliable Source and why an article should have links to and from other articles. Most editors, old or new, have never had an experienced editor looking over their shoulder and coaching them as I do, and the lack of Short Description should merely doom the new article to be labeled as at best a Start-class or even a Stub. And yes, in perpetuity we'll be working on dead-ends, orphans, and other commonplace shortcomings, and deciding whether a new Stub article is worth the cost of upgrade. Jim.henderson (talk) 20:34, 27 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Writing short descriptions sounds like something which LLMs should be good at assisting with. feminist🩸 (talk) 02:52, 28 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It would be really good at assisting with that. They would just need to be tagged that a LLM generated the short description from the article. Jake01756 (talk) (contribs) 19:51, 28 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Better still, writing short descriptions sounds to me like a great entry level task for new editors, especially new editors who have not yet got their head round referencing. I've added short descriptions as an exercise at Template:Welcome training. Ϣere SpielChequers 14:03, 2 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

To view the short descriptions next to each article name in a category, import User:SD0001/shortdescs-in-category.js into your common.js file. That script will display a "Show SDs" button next to the article list. I think this tool has more uses than just article SD maintenance, There are areas of knowledge where article titles often tell nothing about its content. In the sciences and mathematics, article titles often reflect the names of the discoverer of the article's content, e.g. Ohm's law, or Gauss's lemma (polynomials). The SD can give useful information to the reader looking at a category listing full of names like that.--agr (talk) 03:18, 7 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

IMO, the most effective thing you can do is to expose the SDs in ==See also== list of every article you edit, using template:Annotated link (or {{anli}}. Article titles are typically very short and many are impenetrably incomprehensible to anyone not already familiar with the topic: SDs provide a good means to give readers a clue as to the content and thus why they might ever actually want to 'see also'. Compare

Occam's razor
Occam's razor – Philosophical problem-solving principle †

Sooner or later, you will encounter a ==See also== of a lot more than half-a-dozen entries. That's where the template {{AnnotatedListOfLinks}} comes in. Just prepend the list with {{subst:AnnotatedListOfLinks| }} and postpend it with }} then save. The list is annotated and the {{AnnotatedListOfLinks}} slips quietly away. You must check the result because of course this is where you find the horrible SDs and the missing SDs that you now are now duty-bound to correct. And be advised that some editors really don't like the SDs being exposed.

† (well, that's a start but in this case the SD hasn't advanced us much because we are stymied here by the "well it made sense at the time" decision to restrict SDs to 40 characters, apparently because of an iPhone limitation, but you can always extend it by appending some local text

{{anli|Occam's razor}} that recommends searching for explanations constructed with the smallest possible set of elements
Occam's razor – Philosophical problem-solving principle that recommends searching for explanations constructed with the smallest possible set of elements

--𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 19:42, 15 March 2025 (UTC) revised 19:46, 15 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]