I agree with Magnus that it should be Wikidata to the rescue for problems like these, not some new policy that throws current WP contributors into a tizzy. I am not sure how precisely, but maybe if all parts of a lead sentence were in Wikidata then one could then experiment with a new Wikidata property for "Mobile lead" which could first be seeded with the label and barring that the WP lead?
On Mon, Mar 9, 2015 at 12:47 PM, Amir E. Aharoni < [email protected]> wrote: > I'll state a bunch of things that are obvious to me, but should probably > be written down in some way... > > IPA, other names, and names in other languages indeed make reading harder. > They are there because of a tradition. There's a tradition of printing > encyclopedia articles like this (that's also where the bold font in each > articles' first words comes from). Just open any printed encyclopedia. It's > a nice continuation of tradition, and Wikipedia takes it to extremes thanks > to the blessings of Unicode - old printed encyclopedias were lucky to have > Cyrillic characters in their typography, and some good ones had IPA, > Arabic, and Devanagari, but you won't find pervasive use of Georgian or > Kannada in a lot of printed encyclopedias. We have pretty much everything > in Wikipdeia. The information is valuable, but having it all in parentheses > in the first sentence begins to be non-practical. > > It will help to at least be aware that a proposal to change this will > break with traditions; traditions must be treated with respect. But in the > 21st century on the web it may make sense to transfer IPA and names in > other languages to the infobox. Other names in the same language will > probably have to stay in the opening sentence, because article naming is a > super-contentious issue. > > And yes, the Foundation has no authority to just change it, because it's a > matter for the Manual of Style, which is owned by the community (in all > languages). As a member of the editing community, I would support it, and I > even mentioned it on mailing lists in the past (too busy to search where), > but it needs to go through proper discussion. > > > -- > Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי > http://aharoni.wordpress.com > “We're living in pieces, > I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore > > 2015-03-07 2:49 GMT+02:00 Dan Garry <[email protected]>: > >> (moving to mobile-l) >> >> Thanks Vibha, this is really informative. >> >> It's very clear that our first sentences really suck for supporting quick >> lookup, primarily because their information hierarchy is all wrong. That >> said, it's important to remember that we now have Wikidata descriptions >> displayed in the apps for this exact reason: to let people find out quickly >> and easily what something is. >> >> So, although I agree that our first sentences are suboptimal, it's >> important to put the problem in context and remember that users do have >> Wikidata descriptions now to satisfy this use case. It's not like we're >> totally failing them, we could just be doing a bit better. >> >> Rather than piling on hacks by trying to scrape the content in the first >> sentence and reorganise it (which causes information loss, and is extremely >> fragile from a technological perspective), the long term solution is, at >> least to me, to invest in is getting our engaged readers to write clear, >> coherent Wikidata descriptions. These can then be used across all platforms >> to support that workflow. >> >> Of course, there may be room for some quick wins that we can put in place >> while we figure out truly compelling UX for getting readers to submit >> descriptions. We can explore those quick wins in our brainstorming session >> on Monday. But we must remember that these will only be short-term, hacky >> solutions to the problem, and that we need to address this problem at the >> source in order to be really successful at it. >> >> Thanks! >> >> Dan >> >> On 6 March 2015 at 16:13, Jon Robson <[email protected]> wrote: >> >>> Any reason this is on mobile-tech and not mobile-l (I'd love to hear >>> from people like Amir on this subject)? It would be good to flag this >>> problem to a wider audience and part of our problem with most mobile issues >>> is people just are not aware of this sort of thing. Many probably haven't >>> even heard of the hemingway app... >>> >>> It would be interesting to see how a wikidata generated first sentence >>> would score with the same app. >>> >>> On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 at 3:54 PM, Vibha Bamba <[email protected]> >>> wrote: >>> >>>> Hi Folks, >>>> Kaity and I used the Hemingway app <http://www.hemingwayapp.com/> to >>>> analyze the readability of our first sentence, using a few articles. They >>>> all scored poorly, an ideal grade level of 10 is recommended for clear bold >>>> writing. >>>> >>>> This difficult problem arises from the first sentence containing one or >>>> more of the following: >>>> >>>> - IPA Keys >>>> - Birth/ death dates >>>> - Other Names/ AKA's >>>> - Help/info links >>>> - Alternate spellings and scripts >>>> - Additional details >>>> >>>> Details like dates are replicated in the infobox, if it exists in the >>>> article. >>>> Other templates such as AKA's/IPA's are extremely useful but need to be >>>> presented in a clear and structured manner. Some of this comes from the >>>> Manual >>>> of style >>>> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Lead_section#First_sentence>, >>>> but it is abused in many cases. >>>> >>>> Its sad, because many readers come to Wikipedia to answer the 'What is >>>> this/ who is this' question. Google Knowledge panel strips out all brackets >>>> and presents important details as a list, under the description. >>>> >>>> We have started investigating solutions for this on mobile. I would >>>> encourage you to try this out on mobile web or apps. >>>> >>>> Thanks >>>> Vibha & Kaity >>>> >>>> --- >>>> >>>> Articles we used: >>>> Bern <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bern> >>>> Genghis Khan <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genghis_Khan> >>>> Cephalopod <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cephalopod> >>>> Mahatma Gandhi <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi> >>>> Nietzsche <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche> >>>> Carthage <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carthage> >>>> Phoenicia <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenicia> >>>> Timur <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timur> >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> ---- >>>> Vibha Bamba >>>> Senior Designer | WMF Design >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >>> >> >> >> -- >> Dan Garry >> Associate Product Manager, Mobile Apps >> Wikimedia Foundation >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Mobile-l mailing list >> [email protected] >> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l >> >> > > _______________________________________________ > Mobile-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l > >
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