Call me old-fashioned, but I would really hate to see the lead sentences of Wikipedia articles auto-generated by a program. Our text is dry and monotonous enough as it is :)
On Mon, Mar 9, 2015 at 5:05 AM, Jane Darnell <[email protected]> wrote: > 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 >> >> > > _______________________________________________ > Mobile-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l > >
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