Topic on Talk:Reading/web/Projects/Wikidata Descriptions

I wonder if such a feature could also work using article text (say, the first sentence in the article) rather than Wikidata, both for the sake of articles without Wikidata items and for Wikidata items with quality issues - I otherwise foresee a number of complaints about the latter.

You mean extract the lead sentence from each article. Problem is lead sentence isn't always indicative. Apparently you see the value of te feature, but you are looking for different ways to implement it? What is the concern with Wikidata? Thanks.

There have been a multitude of complaints - not always on centrally visible places - on the English Wikipedia about the lack of sourcing and difficulty in editing of Wikidata entries. Thus such a change might not be liked over there.

Also, maybe there is research out there saying otherwise, but in my experience the lead sentence of a Wikipedia article usually is indicative - which is something also required by the guideline. And really, the majority of all Wikipedia articles don't have an associated Wikidata item.

The lead sentence is also VERY VERY long generally (somewhere around 20 and 40 words) and funnily enough hardly ever sourced in practice. Regarding coverage.. that's a challenge to fulfill, not a problem. It's not like we have wikidata descriptions now, so a description is not a requirement, it's a nice to have. Also I strongly suspect that this is a perfect example of the 80:20 like logic. The most read articles will have very high Wikidata coverage, and the remainder won't be off any worse than before.

Technically, leads are usually dependent on (sourced) text elsewhere on the article.

Nice in theory, but in practice I don't think it really matters... Wikidata descriptions are somewhere between a disambiguation tag and a first sentence. And closer to a disambiguation tag. How much sourcing do you want to apply to a 4 word tag... ? We have categories with more words than most wikidata descriptions. It seems to me like a problem that doesn't actually exist in practice.

Nationalist debates are not unheard of. So yes. Nor will complaints about errors on Wikidata that get posted on (or about) Wikipedia instead because it looks like this text is part of Wikipedia.

I wonder if the first few words of a Wikipedia article could make a short enough description or not - to address the length concerns.